Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/05/26/choose.html
Brett
Smith of the FSF has announced a new tutorial available on the GNU
website that
gives advice about picking a license for your project.
I’m glad that Brett wrote this tutorial. My typical answer when
someone asks me which license to chose is to
say: Use AGPLv3-or-later
. That’s a glib answer
unless you can think of a good reason not to
that is rarely helpful to questioner. Brett’s article is much better
and more useful.
For me, the particularly interesting outcome of the tutorial is how it
finishes a the turbulent trajectory of the FSF’s relationship with
Apache’s license. Initially, there was substantial acrimony between the
Apache Software Foundation and the FSF
because version 2.0
of the Apache License is incompatible
with the GPLv2, a
point on
which the
Apache Software Foundation has long disagreed with the FSF. You can
even
find cases
where I was opining in the press about this back when I was Executive
Director of the FSF.
An important component of GPLv3
drafting was to reach out and mend relationships with other useful
software freedom licenses that had been drafted in the time since GPLv2
was released. Brett’s article published yesterday shows the culmination
of that fence-mending: Apache-2.0 is now not only compatible with the
GPLv3 and AGPLv3, but also the FSF’s recommended permissive license!
