For the past two months I've been trying to figure out the best license to use for the new project. I knew that I wanted the code to be open source but I wasn't sure specifically which open source license to choose. I've been reading and studying open source licenses for years and I continue to be amazed by the sheer variety of choices we have.
The leading licensing contenders for the new project included the GPL, a variant on the Mozilla Public License, the Perl Artistic License, a "public domain" license, or writing my own.
In fact, I came pretty close to writing my own license. It was going to be called the "Screw It, I Don't Care License." The entire text of the license would read:
Screw it. I don't care.
My rationale was that I'm bored out of my mind by the politics and legal aspects of source code licensing. The last thing I want is to be pulled into a legal battle over some source code that I'm trying to give away. My feeling is that if you are going to "steal" open source code and violate a licensing agreement then there is pretty much nothing that I, or my team of lawyers, is going to be able to do to stop you. So I just want to put things out there and ask the people that use it to treat the code, and the author, with respect.
In the end I decided that it was probably better to pick a license that said as much but used more family-oriented language. So I picked the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Common Deed. It says:
You are free:Under the following conditions:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
- to make commercial use of the work
- You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
- Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
That's the "human readable" version. The actual legalese (which itself is perfectly readable) is also available for the Creative Commons BY-SA 2.5 Legal Code.
You've no doubt seen this license before -- it is the defacto standard for blog content and photo sharing (such as on Flickr). While I haven't seen it used for source code before, I figure I may as well set a precedent. It's a good license and it is written in the spirit in which I'd like people to use my code. Enjoy!
[Update: Considering that the license says "you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor", I suppose I should specify something. If you want to use or creative a derivative work of one of these projects (or something on the site as a whole), I prefer that you like back to the most appropriate URL, be it the page where you found the code, the project homepage, or an individual blog post. Also, I'd like that you link my name back to http://www.unto.net. For example, if you are creating something based on the new project, your attribution should read:
Based on the new project by DeWitt Clinton.
Thanks!]