I meant I was planning to, unless there's some disaster. I'm working on it now. Anyone have any preference for licenses? BSD? Or should I not have asked that...

> Anyone have any preference for licenses?

From what I've seen, projects that go GPL tend to be more community-focused, and seem to more readily gather a contributor community around them. I think contributors tend to like the idea of their contribution being free in perpetuity.

MIT-licensed projects, OTOH, tend to be mostly worked-on by their creator (again, FWICT). That is, there are fewer individuals willing to contribute code to a project which could simply be scooped up and put into some company's closed-source product. I get the impression that MIT-licensed projects are always looking to be popular, and feel entitled to be so, since users can basically do whatever they want with the code.

A lot of careful thought by lawyers, the community, and the FSF has gone into the most current GPL. I'd suggest that it's worth considering.

I think there's a rule that when you create a new language you also have to create a new open source compatible license. I look forward to releasing code under The Arc License.

Double points if the license is written in Arc itself.

Well, it is a hard question. And the best person to answer it are you. I like simple licenses (BSD[1], MIT[2]...), but only if you don't mind people making closed version of it.

Being Arc a language, I think you would like to remain the head of its development, so maybe the Artistic License [3][4]would be right. Like Perl does.

It's far more complicated than the simple ones, but it would make easier to differentiate between the Vanilla Arc and the Straciatella Arc.

For the GPL[5], I think it is better suited for programs than for languages.

[0] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category

[1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

[2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

[3] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php

[4] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-2.0.php

[5] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

I like the MIT license (aka X11 license). It's simple, understandable, and permissive.

Seconded. If you really want a 100-year language, then your chief concern is getting it widely-adopted, and a permissive license like MIT is just the ticket.

I'm not so sure that liberal licensing leads to popularity. One obvious counter-example of your supposition is GNU/Linux vs. BSD.

Incidentally, the last thing the FSF is worried about is popularity, yet look at how popular GCC, Emacs, bash, and other GPL'd software is.

Licensing your software with a very liberal license may help make your software more popular with some large companies who are in a position to take advantage of it (and I suspect timing is important here as well), but I'm not so sure it makes your software popular with the developer community.

It's certainly complicated, and depends on several factors.

One thing that's important for languages like Tcl is that they can be embedded within other projects, and for that reason a liberal license was very important. Of course, it's certainly not the only thing you need. The GPL is probably ok for "finished product" sorts of things that you don't need to link against to utilize it.

I prefer zlib or boost licenses which make a distinction for binaries. You don't have to attach the license for binary-only applications which makes it more suited in some cases (like embedded development).

I second zlib. It's slightly more restrictive than MIT, but in a very sensible way. I don't think preventing modified sources from masquerading as the original Arc, or maintaining author attribution will impede adoption overly much.

Pardon my naivete, but are masquerading languages a common problem?

Choosing a license to fight imagined evils seems like the short route to a DRM'd license.

Since you asked, my preference is GPL.

I prefer GPL over BSD strictly for the reason that if someone makes a modified version of Arc publicly available, then we all get to see (and maybe use) the modifications.

Don't do it. GPL means unnecessary issues with some of the enterprise companies trying to adopt your product.

What about having an open source friendly license as well as one for enterprises IT and software vendors ala MySql?

Mysql's license is all about trying to make money from Mysql. My guess is that pg would prefer wider adoption to trying to make money. At least, initially.

symlink: Like they would anyway. Ha ha bloody ha.

The license should be Affero GPL.

My favorite license is MIT. BSD ain't bad but MIT makes so much more sense for a programming language.

i'll take the bait :-) why not just public domain it?

If someone publishes a bug fix, or finds a cleaner way of doing something, I'd like to be able to incorporate it without being accused of having stolen their IP. That's the main thing.

BSD license allows you to re-use fixes of others (assuming they also release their fix under BSD), but it does not compel them them to reveal their fix if they distribute only a binary.

GPLv2 requires modified public distributions to also be under GPLv2, so you could both see the fix/change and use it (in the sense that you won't be infringing on copyright).

GPLv3 adds patent protection, so someone adding a fix/change that they have also patented explicitly grants a license for that patent.

I think GPLv3 is the most comprehensive way to keep fixes/changes of others available for reuse.

If you use the GPL you will want to add a lisp-specific preamble such as is found in the LLGPL (http://opensource.franz.com/preamble.html).

Don't forget that if you use the GPLv3 you won't be able to distribute your software with the OLPC, since it has anti-theft measures which put signed code at an advantage to unsigned.

If I recall correctly, the Apache license has some kind of clause to the effect that all contributors automatically grant you all the same rights available under the license, meaning that by contributing, they acknowledge the license and give you permission to make use of their contribution. There is also some anti-patent stuff.

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

OTOH, it's a big, long license, and perhaps the BSD license would be simpler, which is always an advantage.

I'm for a BSD type of license.

Public domain is not enforcable in some countries. You can't give up your copyright as author for example in germany. So a license defining the rights of the users will work better.

Someone IANALed in Reddit that 'Do Whatever Fuck You Want With It' license is not legally enforcable or something. So I'll take 'Public Domain'.

curious: is there any difference between public domain and MIT?

they seem like ostensibly the same thing.

There is no such thing as public domain for software. If you simply give your software away, it's still your copyrighted work...just without a license for other people to use it.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225

What about the WTFPL license?

"Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"

It's actually not a joke: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/

I'd like to be able to embed it in apps. Any license that allows that is OK by me.

Some ideas I've got floating around are to use it for scripting (instead of, say, LUA or XSLT) and for config files (instead of XML) in existing apps. Also, lisp seems fantastically placed for HTML generation, so if I embed it in an IIS or Apache site, then great!

The license should cover patents. If a company adds to the code using patented algorithms, they could perhaps block further development since nobody could use the code? I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps it's not a problem anyway.

pg: It should be Affero GPL. You won't overthrow Java et al anyway, but if Arc is as good as we all anticipate, choosing AGPL may really help the free software.

The ISC license seems to fit your style.

Apache.

Come on... I phrased it: "Likely", didn't I? :-)

Er... yes you did. A Reddit worthy headline would have been "Paul Graham Exposed! Fundamentalist Christian plans to finish an arc before 'Judgement Day'"

I think you mean "Ron Paul Graham."

"Arc Doesn't Scale, You Should Use PHP"