Please help me choose a license!

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georgeoc
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Posts: 166
Joined: Wed Aug 09, 2006 4:21 pm
Location: London, UK

Please help me choose a license!

Post by georgeoc »

Hi all,

I'm lead developer on m2f. We're having trouble deciding on which license is appropriate for our application.

The legal jargon, and indeed even the human-readable equivalents on the Creative Commons site, make my head hurt. I just don't want to get anything wrong and get into trouble by mistake.

Here are the principle requirements we have of a license:
  • we want to release it as Open Source code
  • we don't want others to make money from it by selling it
  • we want to be able to make money from it by the means of donations, providing support or extra modules, etc
  • we want to honour the licenses of any 3rd-party library that we include in the m2f package
At the moment we're including a number of external libraries such as Zend, Swiftmailer, HTMLPurifier, etc. in the m2f package. I haven't modified the code from any of them, but have extended and adapted a few of the classes for our needs.

It seems that almost all the PHP libraries I use have a LGPL or GNU license. Are either of these appropriate for us? I was confused in particular by this line in the LGPL:
The LGPL is intended for software libraries, rather than executable programs.
Does m2f (a self-contained PHP application) count as a "software library" or an "executable program" in this case?

I'm sure there's a simple answer to my question, but I'd love some advice!

Cheers
crazycoders
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Posts: 260
Joined: Tue Oct 28, 2008 7:48 am
Location: Montreal, Qc, Canada

Re: Please help me choose a license!

Post by crazycoders »

You got it right... LGPL is for libraries, whilst GPL is for software not meant to be integrated in another software :)

About the money and donations though, i don't think there are limitations for you to receive donations. Note that GPL and LGPL are copyleft so no one can appropriate the code as is but ANYONE can COPY IT AND CHANGE IT and become the owner of the new code AS LONG AS THEY INCLUDE A COPY NOTICE THAT THEY TOOK IT FROM YOU...

That last line was really important...
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