Comment by Tommy Hodgins on "How do you handle OSS licenses?"

When I need to quickly understand what a license means, I look it up on: TL;DR Legal

Here's the TL;DR of the MIT license: https://tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license

It breaks it down so at a glance it's easy to understand what you are allowed to do, not allowed to do, and how attribution works.

I'm a big advocate of open-source software, and believe that open-sourcing your work is an important way to give back to those that follow in your footsteps, an act of corporate stewardship.

Because I love open-source so much I used to use a lot of plugins and libraries and free-to-use snippets in my work, but after having worked for a number of companies who later sold their product (or themselves) to another company I've had to retroactively sign releases claiming that 100% of the work I did on the project was legal and all code is 'owned' by myself and the original company, and that I would personally take legal liability after making this statement so if there ever was a dispute about ownership of the code.

After signing those a few times I prefer to do clean-room implementations of ideas, and work mostly with my own code. I still believe in open-source, but for me the licenses make it tricky to work with a lot of OSS code.

For my own releases, I have been using MIT because it seems very liberal. In the future I might go full 'Public Domain' for stuff I release just so there's no possible confusion.

Thanks a lot for the link, the site looks good to get a quick overview!

I think, it is good to contribute actively to opensource, but there is one thing which has again and again annoyed me: people who use weak licensed software, like MIT and BSD, to build expensive software without contributing upstream. That´s why, imho, a license like MPL makes a lot of sense, since it still is very open, but forces the users to at least contribute modifications (like fixes, enhancements and some new features).

Oooh, I think the MPL would be a no-go for a lot of users due to this:

Disclose Source

All modified files containing MPL'd code must be disclosed under the MPL.

If I'm working on an app and code that MPL-licensed code touches has to be MPL I can tell you 0 clients I work with would go for that!

@tomhodgins I don't see the problem. Let's say fileA contains a library you want to use and is MPL-licensed. So you make a fileB which contains your (non-disclosed) source and which links to fileA . FileB is under any license you want. In the end you add a license file to the final product which includes all the licenses you have to publish.

Correct me if I am wrong...

It sounds like it might get around it legally, but introducing (otherwise unnecessary) complexity into your codebase by splitting your code into different files based on license is not a good solution for most codebases. It's just not going to end up happening - or happening 100% of the time in the real world. It's far easier to use liberal licenses without worry and ignore anything with a 'viral' license than it is to deal with.

I agree with Tommy. The good approach may be: at the first step, you should determine how much open your product will be. That is the most important point. From that, you can choose the right license for your product. Once your product has got a license, the rest are so simple, just use the tools/libraries those are appropriate to your product's license.

@tomhodgins I would never write my code into the file of a third-party library... I rather split up my own code into many small files! But I guess everyone is different, huh :)

@ndaidong yeah, you are right. But the problem is that many different licenses have many different requirements and as a result have to be handled in different ways. The many different licenses stem from everyone having diffferent thoughts about how OSS code should be handled (see our discussion alone; which is a good thing imho, btw). Problems arise especially then, when you do not want to go opensource. I really love programming and contributing to the community, but I also need money, hence I have some proprietary projects :)

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