Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Licenses in ten words or less

Following my yesterday's entry on the letter and spirit of software licenses, i started thinking about translating the intent into the words. Some manage to do it in a few sentences, some require sizeable chunks of Amazon forests to be printed. But i say this - if you can't express your intent in less than ten words, just pick an existing license. So, here is my take on the three licenses that i understand best:

• BSD - do whatever you want, just mention my name
• LGPL - you change it, you give the source back
• GPL - you take it, you give all your source

Going through EPL, MPL, CDDL, ASL and a variety of others, i see a lot of words about patents, indemnification, and general hand-waving about issues that were never taken to the court (as far as i know). And now, here are my favorite acronyms that everybody uses in conjunction with the license discussion:

• IANAL
• IMHO
• AFAIU

Note that these are usually followed by grand statements that divide the good from the bad, the white from the black and the world from Microsoft :)

Comments

• What about X11/MIT License ?

  Posted by: speps on June 07, 2007 at 10:58 AM

• MIT - you can do anything but sue us

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

  Posted by: aberrant on June 07, 2007 at 12:51 PM

• GPL: We pwn u!

  Posted by: jwenting on June 07, 2007 at 10:27 PM

• Your ten words on the GPL don't match the actual license text. You may want to read the Creative Commons summary of the GPL v2: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/

  Posted by: robilad on June 08, 2007 at 05:36 AM

• Bah, my comment sounded very harsh, I apologize for that.

  What I meant to say is: it's hard to get licenses faithfully boiled down to a sentence. The CC summary is OK, in that it captures the spirit of the GPLv2, but it's a far cry from a single sentence.

  But, there is one license that can be boiled down faithfully to one sentence:

  http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/COPYING

  Posted by: robilad on June 08, 2007 at 07:42 AM

• i like simon phipps' description in terms of the "public commons":

  GPL/LGPL - changes and additions to stay in "the public commons" ie. given back.
  MPL/CDDL - changes must stay in the commons, but your own additions can be outside of the commons ie. not given up.
  BSD/Apache - your changes and additions can be made outside the commons ie. kept to yourself.

  in CDDL "changes" = changes to existing files in the commons, rather than new files you create, which are additions

  Posted by: evanx on June 08, 2007 at 11:37 AM

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