In practice, open source projects don’t really need protection, because their best contributors are going to be there regardless (yes, I realise the GPL provides more protection to end users who want to get at the source code, that’s not what I’m considering here). It was at this point that I realised that my previous opinions about permissive licenses not providing enough safeguards against exploitation for an open source project were off-base. Separately, he points out that the restrictions on licenses, such as the LGPL, simply are too complex and too restrictive for some developers, and the end result is fewer developers, which is the last thing you should want:
For example, he points out that the restrictions aren’t very helpful for code, because the best code contributions are from those who are contributing code willingly anyway - so the restrictions are meaningless for them. It’s really quite a fascinating post, that brings up a number of issues I hadn’t really thought about too much.
He basically points out that that open source licensing - the kind that forces anyone who uses the code to open up and contribute back their code - is actually creating an unnecessary restriction on developers as well, and it often doesn’t make sense to have such restrictions. In the post, Streeting describes his evolving view on open source licenses.
OGRE ENGINE MODEL PAINTING SOFTWARE
Reader Brad sent in a fascinating post from a little while back by Steve Streeting, a software developer who created an open source 3D rendering engine called OGRE. Fri, Oct 23rd 2009 07:38pm - Mike Masnick
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