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by sergiotapia 1906 days ago
So what is a good license for "everybody can use this 100% free of charge but please don't change one line and call it yours"? What about a company like Amazon copying your codebase, throwing millions at it and then leaving you in the dust?

MIT seems far too permissible now and I'm looking for a default license for my projects.
3 comments
dashwav 1906 days ago
I have been a big fan of the Mozilla Public License 2.0 [1]. I find it is the best combination of "if you use this and improve or modify, those changes need to go to the original code" while not restricting overall usage.

IMO there really isn't anything you can do to prevent people from making a product out of your work if it is open source, but what you can do is make sure that if someone makes improvements to your work, those improvements need to be publicly available under the MPL2.0 license as well.

This has the effect that if someone wants to make a product by just 'adding one line' that line needs to be published and you could add it upstream, making it publicly available again(thus making it harder to make a product solely from your code).

[1] https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mpl-2.0/

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SilverRed 1906 days ago
Isn't that the same as lgpl?
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protomyth 1906 days ago
What about a company like Amazon copying your codebase, throwing millions at it and then leaving you in the dust?

Well, they can do that with the GPL thus spawned the AGPL which didn't fix the problem either thus MongoDB and companies licenses.

"everybody can use this 100% free of charge but please don't change one line and call it yours"

Well, the BSD licenses require redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms

I know some GPL advocates tend to feel they can remove the copyright statement, but BSD code is BSD code and requires your copyright statement to be preserved.

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mey 1906 days ago
Different generations of the BSD and Apache licenses have had attribution clauses to various levels of strictness. (Older ones were more strict). Neither are copyleft (Like GPL/CDDL) forcing future improvements to be open sourced. CDDL may be interesting as a way to preventing improvements to a code base from going "dark" but still being non-copyleft compatible. (Hello Sun/Oracle). Another commenter mentioned MDL which CDDL was based on for Sun's needs, that is also worth looking at.
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