Re:PG: Arc Likely To Be Open-Sourced This Winter
by big-j on Tuesday January 15, 2008 @01:20AM
(#98579)
> 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.
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.