An open source license

Archive
1

Anyone out there has some more details on open source licensing?
Since users that do not care about copyright are already using our drivers, this is not fair to users who care about our work so we are considering releasing the source codes to the public, but under what license?

Not GPL for sure because we want users to be able to use the code commercially and not release their own code. Now what about BSD, MIT or Apache…or any other ones. What licences you would like to see? Should we just go with what Microsoft used for NETMF?

FYI, The drivers source code is still for use with GHI products only till we announce the new open source licensing.

2

MS went with the Apache license for most stuff I believe. Not sure of what all the differences are.

3

I’ve always liked BSD, however take a look at the creative commons licenses. They have a range of levels on the licenses.

The attribution share-alike license is very simple and would work well for something like this. The nice thing about creative commons licenses are they are extremely easy to understand. Anyone can understand them quickly and easily, unlike some other licenses (GPL/LGPL) which are so long and tedious you are left without quite knowing where you stand sometimes.

[url]http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/[/url]

4

Here is a good writeup about comparing open source licences. CDDL for example seems to be a good choice for open source projects.

5

CodePlex has an array of different licenses. I personally like MS-RL [url]http://systemhtml.codeplex.com/license[/url]

Here is the list from codeplex:

Apache License 2.0 (Apache)
New BSD License (BSD)
Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
Eclipse Public License (EPL)
GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2)
GNU Library General Public License (LGPL)
The MIT License (MIT)
Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)
Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)
Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL)