Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

Too often people choose licenses for their projects without giving enough thought to potential implications. AGPL and GPLv3 in particular seem to be the kind of licenses you should think really, really hard about before choosing to use them.

View on HN

No – think really, really hard before accepting contributions under those licenses. If you're worried about not being able to take it proprietary, have some kind of Contributor Agreement saying “you need to hand over the copyright to get pull requests merged”.

Yeah, if you wanna to work for free for the richest company(s) in the world, you should use MIT license instead.

I'm not trying to say that some licenses are better than others. They just have different implications. And I often see that people fail to properly think about those. Yes, MIT implies that anyone can just take your code and run with it. But so can you.

APGL on the other hand requires more upfront thought about how you're going to organize the project in general and what you might do with it later on.

With the MIT license you must still keep the copyright notice in the source files.

So no changing the license per say. But no way from a binary to tell if this has been adhered to.

You can distribute derivatives under a different, compatible license, and almost everything is compatible with the MITL.

> work for free

That is a very odd framing of the choice. Using the MIT license is not a zero-sum game. If AppGooFaceSoft choose to use your software without paying you anything, the only costs would exist within your own mind and depend entirely on your beliefs, not some external standard.

When I use (L)GPL license, a) I want to use their fixes and contributions to my code for free, even if they prefer not to share, and b) I don't want for them to limit my freedom to modify MY code in THEIR product.

I cannot achieve my goals with MIT license.

AGPL and GPL3 do allow for a proprietary alternative that has clearly separated modules that use only the GPL3/AGPL code as binaries. They could have done something similar to the qt licensing scheme.

I think the developers who change the licenses of this repo have bad faith and yes, I agree, they deeply misunderstood the licenses or they planned all along to ride the 'free software' banner for adoption to then make money out of it. They could have done it in a more elegant way.

> AGPL and GPLv3 in particular seem to be the kind of licenses you should think really, really hard about before choosing to use them.

On the contrary, GPL and especially AGPLv3 gives the developers better protection than permissive ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-software_license#Comparis...

Is there a recommended way to license a project as permissively as possible? I like the MIT license because it's widely accepted and short enough that it can be read and understood but what if you're OK with someone using a small (but large enough to be a copyrighted work) piece of your code without bothering to maintain the license.

There's the WTFPL License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL) but that doesn't seem like a great option either. For my project (https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate) I dual licensed under the MIT and CC0 licenses even though CC0 isn't really designed for software but it seemed reasonable. It seems surprisingly difficult to release code with no conditions besides limiting liability.

If it is your own project, which doesn't depend on other's, then you can simply change it anytime you like if you decided GPLv3 no longer suited your needs. It is typically problematic when you are using someone else's program released under GPL; they released it under GPL hoping for what GPL entails.

You're trying to make this scarier than it is with the word "implications". The only thing you can't do is to create a non-free work that uses other people's copyleft code. What you should think really, really hard about doing is writing non-free software at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com