Hello Hello.
I'd like some opinions on the matter of open source licensing.
I'm in the throws of getting my current 'for-fun' project into a beta state, after nearly 15 months... And I'm looking for an appropriate license.
Ideally, what I'm after is something that:
Free for non-commercial use, but I retain complete ownership of all my original code. However I want to leave the door open for those who extend the code.
I don't want to require the source to be distributed, but obviously credit would be nice.
In the event commercial interest crop up (which may happen with other my work, ironically) I still wish to be able to do one-off for $$$ licenses that still keep me legally safe (ie, no one goes off and resells it), yet also I want other contributors to not be forgotten.
Simply I want to encourage others to get in there and help out, with the possibility that they won't stand by and watch just me get rich
Now I'm no legal expert, so I can't exactly decide if 20 pages of legal speak is going to be best for me. There seem to be two major options, being CC non commercial share alike and LGPL, yet of course there are various other licenses all over the show, from MIT to Intel.
Having been in the situation of having to scrap code because it used GPL'd code (in a commercial closed source project) I obviously don't want to have to put anyone else through such a situation, which I guess gives me a bias away from LGPL (I know, not rational).
And I've also dealt with a hang of a lot of GPL code that convieniently has a 'commercial version, developed in parallel!' that simply changes the notice at the top of each file to LGPL.
Simply, my questions are:
are there any 'perfect fit' licenses out there?
or would most of them be fine anyway?
are there any hidden catches I should take into account?
and how are 3rd party contributors covered? or should I simply ignore this?
any opinions and advice is very highly appreciated.
Thanks.
I'd like some opinions on the matter of open source licensing.
I'm in the throws of getting my current 'for-fun' project into a beta state, after nearly 15 months... And I'm looking for an appropriate license.
Ideally, what I'm after is something that:
Free for non-commercial use, but I retain complete ownership of all my original code. However I want to leave the door open for those who extend the code.
I don't want to require the source to be distributed, but obviously credit would be nice.
In the event commercial interest crop up (which may happen with other my work, ironically) I still wish to be able to do one-off for $$$ licenses that still keep me legally safe (ie, no one goes off and resells it), yet also I want other contributors to not be forgotten.
Simply I want to encourage others to get in there and help out, with the possibility that they won't stand by and watch just me get rich
Now I'm no legal expert, so I can't exactly decide if 20 pages of legal speak is going to be best for me. There seem to be two major options, being CC non commercial share alike and LGPL, yet of course there are various other licenses all over the show, from MIT to Intel.
Having been in the situation of having to scrap code because it used GPL'd code (in a commercial closed source project) I obviously don't want to have to put anyone else through such a situation, which I guess gives me a bias away from LGPL (I know, not rational).
And I've also dealt with a hang of a lot of GPL code that convieniently has a 'commercial version, developed in parallel!' that simply changes the notice at the top of each file to LGPL.
Simply, my questions are:
are there any 'perfect fit' licenses out there?
or would most of them be fine anyway?
are there any hidden catches I should take into account?
and how are 3rd party contributors covered? or should I simply ignore this?
any opinions and advice is very highly appreciated.
Thanks.
