HN Explorer

Ask HN: Which is the liberal opensource license with the least legal overhead?

6 points by DamonOehlman ↗ HN
Based on my own research I've generally opted for the MIT License, but I'm wondering if others with more experience with the legal side of OpenSource can offer some clarification regarding this MIT vs other licenses.

6 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 28.4 ms ] thread
tshtf
In terms of word count, I'm sure the MIT License is one of the lowest. But if you're looking in terms of total legal overheard, you may want to consider that a more modern license crafted by a legal team could possibly be better tuned for the laws than a license with a smaller word count. IANAL.
mariuskempe
The Unlicense - http://unlicense.org. Put your software into the public domain, forget about all legal complexity. And this way people can reuse your code in the most hassle-free way possible.

Also, keep in mind - no matter which software license you choose, your code will go into the public domain eventually.

DamonOehlman
I'm amazed that I haven't heard of unlicense.org before - I think it's definitely worth considering. I really don't have the need to have copyright notices maintained in what I write, so from a personal perspective it's completely compatible.

So when you release software to the public domain, do you still use the words "open source". I'm just mindful that corporate customers have reached a level of comfort around the term "open source" and may not have the same comfort around public domain.

It looks like the SQLite guys have a pretty good way of handling the situation though:

http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

mariuskempe
Sure - open source is about source-code availability, public domain is about the legal status of that source code - as free as can be.
wmf
Public domain, unlicensing, the wtf license, etc. create legal hassles instead of avoiding them, because many people have a short list of preapproved licenses that they understand and these aren't on the list. And companies with legal departments generally don't want to touch these licenses.
mariuskempe
I do know where you're coming from, but SQLite, which is in the public domain, is by far the most deployed SQL implementation, and most of those deployments are by companies - big companies, even.

Also, by your logic, nobody should ever have used the GPL when it was new-fangled.