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Comment by j5155 | Hacker News Reader

Campsite team, if you happen to be reading this: consider whether a more permissive license still meeting the FOSS definition, like GPL or AGPL, would better fit your needs. GPL means that anyone who modifies the source code, or integrates it into a larger work, has to release the modified version.

So this would ensure that everyone’s contributions continue to help the wider community. As a side effect, it would also prevent anyone from using your work without releasing the source code for their project or product, benefitting open source as a whole.

The choice is obviously ultimately yours. I personally didn’t realize the benefits of GPL until recently.

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You may also want to consider the EUPL, which is OSI approved and despite the name not limited to the EU.

https://eupl.eu/

https://discourse.writefreesoftware.org/t/eupl-a-better-choi...

> GPL means that anyone who modifies the source code, or integrates it into a larger work, has to release the modified version.

Is this accurate? I thought GPL only required distributing the source alongside binaries. If you're running GPL code as a web service, I don't think there's a requirement to release the source to your users.

In this case, you would want the Affero General Public License (AGPL) which specifically has a carve-out (in?) for web servers. Section 13, "Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License." [0]

[0] "[...] your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (...) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version"

I would prefer a more permissive license, such as MIT or Apache. Zulip is similar software, produced by a commercial company, and it is MIT licensed. The primary reason for this is that it isn't always clear with copyleft licenses where the boundary is between being a new separate work that uses the GPL software API, or when it is a derivative work of the GPL software. Also, as they are shutting down, there isn't really any reason for them to worry about some one else using the code in a permissive way.

(That being said, a copyleft license is miles ahead of the CC NC license for software!)

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