License Discussion

[elenagan]

Hi everyone! I've listed some pros and cons of a few licenses to start the discussion. Interested to hear your thoughts:

MIT License

Pros

• Simple and commonly used
• Short
• used by Babel, .NET, and Rails

Cons

• Very permissive (conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices)

GNU

Pros

• used by Ansible, Bash, and GIMP
• prevents distributing closed source versions

Cons

• has three different versions (AGPLv3, GPLv3 LGPLv3) with varying strictness
• more complicated
• allow modification and redistribution of the original code, but only under the condition that users make the entire program available under the same license (except for LGPLv3)

Mozilla Public License 2.0

Pros

• Middle ground between the above two in terms of permissiveness
• Created by the Mozilla Foundation who has a commitment to keeping the internet a free and public resource
• used by Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice

Cons

• Less commonly used

For more info:

https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-mozilla-public-license-2-0/
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

[mehdi-naji]

Since this package is in its early stages and probably needs more improvements, I think we must keep users encouraged to make contributions. To this end, the MIT license is likely the best choice. Because, it is permissive and let other use, modify, and distribute it without many restrictions.
If we want to ensure that the contributions to the package remain open-source and available to others, Mozilla Public License 2.0 can also be a good option.

[mikeguron]

Echoing the sentiments expressed by Mehdi, as our package is still in development it could benefit greatly from contributions from other users so a more permissive license is likely our best choice. Thus, the GNU license may be a bit too restrictive for where we are at with the current stage of our package. Furthermore, since we are welcoming contributions from other users it may be a good idea to choose a license that is simple and more commonly used so more users will have familiarity with it. Therefore, of the options listed, I think it would be best to go ahead with the MIT license as is it simple, short, common, and permissive while still preserving copyright.

[DMerigo]

I've used GNU before but I agree at this stage we should use the MIT license, that makes it more accesible and we dont need that much attribution at this point