Ryan Tomayko

The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source —

I like the way Yehuda first lays out his motivations and goals as an open source developer and then evaluates the MIT/BSD vs. GPL licenses based on those goals. That’s how you pick a license. No one can tell you why you write a given piece of free / open source software, so no one can really tell you how it should be licensed.

Like Yehuda, I tend to lean heavily toward MIT/BSD style licenses these days but I can imagine situations where the copyleft stipulations included in the GPL would be extremely important to me.

Court: violating copyleft = copyright infringement —

“Unlike the lower court, the appeals court seemed to understand that reciprocity lay at the heart of free software licenses. Just as traditional software firms thrive on the exchange of code for money, free software projects thrive on the exchange of code for code.”

Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons NonCommercial (-NC) License —

Sold! All my stuff will soon be non-NC.