Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom> writes:
> Does anyone have any reasons to *avoid* a particular license? Any input 
> at all? I think I've had a total of 3 suggestions, for 3 different 
> licenses...the Artistic License, GPL, and LGPL.

Well, avoid GPL-incompatible licenses. :-) If you leave out all the
GPL-incompatible licenses from

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

it still gives you a lot to choose from. The X11 and BSD ones are
basically some sort of "public domain" license, as I understand it,
and are as such OK if you aren't interested in protecting your code
(but it seems you are).

The reason for choosing a GPL-compatible license is that else people
working on GPL'ed projects (and most free software is GPL'ed) can't
legally use your code - so you risk eternal complaints (or even a
clone project with the sole purpose of replacing the license).

The Freetype project apparently dual licenses their library just to
avoid this situation, Trolltech did the same with Qt for KDE and the
Mozilla project is currently also walking along that path. But dual
licensing is a mess, IMHO.

So according to the list on gnu.org I would avoid what they describe
as the original Artistic License. LGPL is simply GPL with the
permission to link with proprietary, closed software, so if that is
what you want, I'd recommend it instead. When you're using an
FSF-blessed license, you're also absolutely sure to stay out of
trouble. :-)

> The main two licenses I'm considering are the Artistic License and the 
> LGPL, and I'm leaning strongly toward the Artistic License, which seems 
> generally simpler and more understandable.

I think you're underestimating how widely known the LGPL is compared
to the Artistic License. A lot of people probably wouldn't ever need
to read the license if you choose the LGPL.

But then again, most people probably wouldn't even look at the
license, anyway... ;-)

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://sunsite.dk/olau/

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