from Hacker News

There are 665 open licences, most are pretty rubbish

by qsantos on 9/18/24, 7:24 PM with 21 comments

• by heavensteeth on 9/19/24, 6:59 AM

  > Well, although SPDX counts 665 licences, there really just 3 main kinds:

  > 1. licences with no restrictions (like MIT)

  > 2. licences that require you credit the original author ("attribution" licences, including the Apache Licence)

  > 3. licences that require you credit the original author and that derivative works have the same licence ("copyleft"/"share-alike" licences like the GPL)

  MIT requires attribution, doesn't it? MIT (permissive) / MPL (non-viral copyleft) / AGPL (viral copyleft) seems like a better grouping to me; I rarely find myself reaching for any other licenses.

  I do wish there were a shorter copyleft license though. I appreciate how transparent and readable MIT is.

• by exabrial on 9/18/24, 11:45 PM

  My favorite is EUPL: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/introduction-eup...

  Essentially licensing your software like this behaves like ASL unless you: modify + distribute (either binaries or by creating a service). Then you owe the changeset back, but it does not have a viral clause like the AGPL.

  This solves a large part of the greedy AWS problem (Amazon copying entire open source projects and contributing nothing back), but also strikes a balance and allows API Compatibility.

• by robobro on 9/19/24, 2:09 PM

  Open license #666: the goatse license, which is absolutely not rubbish https://github.com/153/goatse-license

• by jimjag on 9/19/24, 12:33 PM

  Most of the licenses discussed in the article are demonstrably NOT open source licences at all.

• by yarg on 9/19/24, 9:46 AM

  The moment that hits 666, it ticks right on over to 667.

  People have their beliefs; and not only does no-one want to release The Satanic License, no-one's gonna want it to remain that unlucky for long.

  Weird little monkeys we are, for the amazing things we can be.

• by hiAndrewQuinn on 9/19/24, 2:53 PM

  I'm a big fan of CC0. It's my go-to for any side projects I work on, for all kinds of reasons, but mostly just because I feel it minimizes economic deadweight loss by incurring zero additional transaction costs.

• by kbknight on 9/20/24, 2:56 PM

  The dig at Nokia for specifying the jurisdiction seems unfair. Licenses are just words on a screen: they mean what the court in a jurisdiction say they mean. Sue in the right jurisdiction. Entire paragraphs can be scratched out (and whole pages added) based on how the case law in a jurisdiction says certain words have to be interpreted.

• by Shadowmist on 9/18/24, 9:50 PM

  Need one more.

• by vegadw on 9/19/24, 5:01 PM

  This may be a hot take, but I love the un-usable for business licenses and the fun multiple lowest-to-highest paid worker and ethical restrictions (No use in weapons, for example) licenses, but not for their direct restrictions but rather because almost no large business will ever want to touch them, but small players and individuals don't care.

  Those licenses let me say "This is open to the individual and small business, but not a mega corp" without actually needing to define a hard cut off.

  Besides, it's not like most developers of FOSS software that use these have the time/money/energy to bother to sue over infringement anyway, so practically this is their main purpose.