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by mwcampbell 2141 days ago
I think funding of ambitious open-source projects such as PyPy will continue to be a problem as long as these projects use pushover (a.k.a. permissive) licenses such as the MIT license. It's time for these developers to take a stand for what is fair, by relicensing to a copyleft license such as Parity [1] and selling proprietary licenses to companies that can and should pay.

[1]: https://paritylicense.com/ (not affiliated, I just think it's a good and fair license)

2 comments

I've not heard of this license before, and a search for "parity" comes up empty on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html and https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical so it's not Free Software or Open Source.

It might be free software or open source (i.e. in spirit), but I don't have the patience to read potentially-dubious licenses (that's what the FSF and OSI are for!)

I'll add in https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ as a place where it would be nice for Parity License to be documented for comparison reasons.
Though I think the Parity License is a clearer license than FSF-endorsed copyleft licenses such as the GPL, my point still stands if you substitute one of those licenses.
Could someone explain key differences between Parity and GPL? I haven’t encountered this before
I'm far from an expert on this, so other commenters please correct me if I'm wrong:

GPL requires that any project that uses a GPL project as a part of it must also be free and open source.

It looks like Parity requires that you pay a licensing fee to the original creator of the Parity licensed project if you're using it for non-open-source reasons. So, it can be used for private/for-profit projects, but you have to pay for it in that case, whereas open source projects can use the code for free.

How is that different from just licensing as GPL, and offering to purchase a dual license for private projects?
Where do you see the part in the license that discusses a licensing fee?