[ccan] licensing

[Sam Watkins]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2014 at 10:31:40AM +1000, Brad Hards wrote:
> Some of CCAN was extracted from Samba, which has good reasons for wanting to 
> be GPL, so those parts of CCAN are derived works. 

Can we perhaps make it more clear which modules have which licenses?

I would prefer totally separate repositories for GPL or other copyleft
code, which is not free to reuse in any project, versus CC0/BSD/MIT
code, which is free to reuse in any project; and I would support only
the latter.

I don't mind if an integrated project such as Samba is GPL,
but I oppose the GPL for reusable libraries.

GPL'd code snippets can be of some use: I can read and learn from them,
then reimplement them myself in my own way and using a sensible license
such as MIT.  But this is much less useful than code I can reuse
directly.  (Please don't tell me it is immoral to read and learn from
GPL'd code, or Stallman's twisted soul may rise up against itself and
bring the apocalypse.)

To be clear, I am more concerned about being able to reuse code freely
in other open source projects with more liberal licenses or
GPL-incompatible licenses, not so much about proprietary projects.

I have released at least 95% of my own code in the public domain,
however I also do work as a software developer on non-free code.
I do also free the best and most reusable of my work related code to the
public domain, where possible.

If I cannot use a code library freely in both settings - public and work
- I will not use it at all.

I am not going to brand my whole project with the GPL in order to make
use of a GPL'd snippet of code, when I would rather give it under a CC0
or MIT license.

The GPL is all about compulsion.  In the GPL mind-set, software
developers, companies and universities cannot be trusted to give back to
the community unless forced to do so.  Perhaps this was true 30 years
ago, it is not true today when every man and his dog wants to write free
software.  Compulsion is the opposite of freedom, and I want to promote
developer freedom.

Sam


> There have been reasonable requests to change licenses in the past. Not many 
> of those say "make it public domain so I can sell your work in my proprietary 
> application and not give anything back" though

neither did I say anything like that