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by jiggy2011 5258 days ago
Right , hence why I used quotation marks around the word viral.

Problem is I'm not enough of a lawyer to know what would and wouldn't be compatible with the GPL (and confident enough to tell other stakeholders). With something like a BSD license it's easier to point to concrete examples of it's co existance (OS X for example).
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skore 5258 days ago
Well, the GNU Project has a pretty extensive list[1], so I'm not sure whether you just haven't seen this yet, or whether there is a different concern here.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

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jiggy2011 5258 days ago
As far as I can tell all of those licenses are some variation of libre licenses, I need something that's compatible with a license that says "this is ours , nobody else can have it".

The reason we need to use a license like that and not a libre license is that some of our software is very niche and would only be useful to a handful of companies around the world.

It's quite likely that none of these other companies employ any programmers at all bar the occasional contractor. Basically we are trying to disrupt an industry (in a small way) by getting more efficiency by doing stuff through tech that they are doing by employing legions of admin staff and using the old-boys network (it's a very old school industry).

If the source for certain parts of our software was available to them then they would most likely simply use it (employing an Indian contractor or similar for a couple of weeks to set it up) to wipe out our advantage and not contribute much if anything back to us.

There are however other parts of the software that could be generally useful to a wide number of people who are much more likely to contribute code back.

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skore 5257 days ago
In that case, you probably want to consult a lawyer beforehand anyhow. If you're working on something truly disruptive and innovative to an established market, software licenses might be your smallest concern.
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jiggy2011 5257 days ago
Nothing truly disruptive or innovative by HN standards, more than we operate in an area that is dominated by people who are simply clueless about technology.

We aren't planning to distribute any of our software so we get along fine just using LGPL / BSD licensed stuff and a few commercial libs for the most part.

Something like AGPL is potentially interesting but if it involves having to hire lawyers we'll probably keep things in-house or maybe release a few bits under LGPL a few years down the line.

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