Licenses

(Meikel) The never ending story: Licenses. Let me explain, why I use the one or the other license for my programs. In general, I think that open source programs are "better" than closed source programs. What means "better"? Well, better means...

• more secure, since people finding (maybe security-related) bugs can simply write a patch, saving time for the main programmers, who only have to check, if the patch is a correct solution.

  Security through obscurity like some larger companies starting with "A" or coming from a town starting with "R" practice it lately just doesn't work. (I am really glad, that I don't have to live in a country, where they have such shitty laws as the DMCA.)

• more customisable, because I can simply add a feature which I need, but the software doesn't provide.
• I can contribute to a project giving me a feeling like "Wow, I've done something useful..."

But open source isn't open source. There are a lot of open source licenses like the "GPL", "LGPL" or the "BSD" license. Why do I not use the latter, for example?

The BSD-license does really nothing for your rights. Say you develop a really great library, which helps authenticating peers in a secure way. You release it under the BSD license and are happy. Then the bad, bad great company comes, takes your library and modifies it a bit, so that it isn't compatible to your original lib anymore, but still features all that nice stuff you built into it. The company calls it a standard and makes a lot of money with your lib and the only thing you can do is buying their products. Congratulations!

The GPL is more restrictive, because you have to give out the source code of any modifications. In general a good thing. So, nobody can make money with your program. For my taste, it's a bit to restrictive. If I would release the libc16 under the GPL you would not be allowed to link a closed-source program against it! You would have to release the program under the GPL, too! And that's (in my eyes) not free (with capital "F"). If I write a program, it's my freedom to choose the license conditions! That's why I distribute the libc16 under the LGPL! But when you change something with the library, then you have to release the source code of the change to the public. So the case above can not happen! So, if you want to use the library go on, but don't expect any support from my side, if it's a closed source project (freeware or not).

With my c16-tools, that's another situation. They give concrete solutions for converting C16 to PNG and vice versa. They are end-user tools. If you use them in your programs, you use my ideas. Then you have to release your source code, too!

Last, but not least: The artistic license! This is the license of Perl. It permits the modification of code and keeping the source of the change closed as long as it stays in your company or your private computer. As soon as it gets into the wild, maybe in a proprietary product, then you have to open the source! That's a good compromise in my eyes.

Any problems or suggestions?
Email cevina@users.sourceforge.net
or Brandels_Mikesh@web.de