Comment by pcthrowaway

2 years ago

> Many of them have made minor or major modifications to the tools, and next to none provide the source to those modifications.

> I am considering relicensing my tools under some sort of Attribution-ShareAlike license similar to the BY-SA the content on this site is licensed under.

Wouldn't the LGPL be well-suited to this?

7 comments

pcthrowaway

Reply
wmf  2 years ago

The attribution required by GPL/LGPL is fairly weak and in practice doesn't prevent the kind of "exploitation" discussed here. Ultimately if you don't market your work you will get steamrolled by people who do; I'm not sure this can or should be fixed.

heavyset_go  2 years ago

Yes, and in some cases the GPL and AGPL.

  • freedomben  2 years ago

    > I want you to use things I've written. On top of that I don't believe it's my place to force you to then open source things you have written that expand upon my source code.

    I'm a big proponent of the GPL and the AGPL, but no they don't sound like good solutions to the author's problems. It might solve the attribution issue but it's going to go counter to the author's other goals.

    • LamaOfRuin  2 years ago

      Except that the author then goes on to say how much they would prefer the derivative works to be open source, so it seems like they do want it but have been convinced they shouldn't. AGPL and an offer that other licenses would be available on request seems perfectly suitable.

      1 reply →

    • pcthrowaway  2 years ago

      That's why I suggested LGPL, which allows the software to be used by closed-source or proprietary software, but any changes to the LGPL-ed library must be made available under the same license.