Table of Contents
Guiding questions
Here are some questions that might help us choose a license:
- What are we hoping that other people might get out of our code?
Thoughts: the main reason to open-source is to invite and encourage enthusiasts to contribute to the project. A distant secondary goal is to share/allow people to see our methods for solving the problems posable in the interface.
- If an ed-tech company started offering a closed-source fork of dyna3 alongside their other products, how would we feel?
Thoughts: This is a bit hard to envision, as it seems quite unlikely. On the other hand GeoGebra has gone from basically a fully open-source community project to something that seems/feels much more commercial and closed. I'd be pretty bummed if some company created major new features/improvements that the open-source side would have to reimplement to distribute freely. To prevent such a thing, we'd basically need some version of the GPL or maybe the Mozilla Public License, is that right? I.e., what's known as a "copyleft", rather than just a "permissive" license? I think I've read that projects with permissive licenses, all else being equal, tend to get more interest/activity, because people just don't need to worry much about those licenses? Does that seem right/plausible?
Here is one guide to licenses, that seems to concur with the above musings. Reading it, the leading candidates seem to be either the Mozilla Public License or the Apache License -- those seem to be at the boundary contemplated above. And I'm not aware of any reason to use a license other than the half-dozen or so listed in that guide.