vcoscrato / agnostic Goto Github PK

At the moment, nobody can use your work in any software, nor in any papers, as you've neglected to specify any software license. Some lesser known software licenses and software licensing practices & options about which you might wish to know:

• You may have heard of the GNU GPLv3 license. However, one may wish to also consider the options of the 'Lesser GPL' (LGPL) and the Affero General Public License (AGPL), or even their combination, all of which one may read about here:
http://mo.morsi.org/blog/2009/08/13/lesser_affero_gplv3/
And also here, but note that the discourse quality in the discussion there at some points becomes very… low:
moll/node-pg-error#1

• The SSPL License (even more strict than the AGPL. Theoretically, akin to the AGPL, compatible with the principles of 'Lower' licenses offering a linker exception), originally developed for MongoDB, about which you can read here: https://lwn.net/Articles/768670/
Note however that the there exists some controversy on this subject, see the comments here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352171

• The OSET OPL License, which contains clever additional provisions necessary for ensuring license compliance by government entities, I'll quote some examples:
"Sovereign Immunity.
Contracting with governments brings up a special issue that doesn’t apply to anyone else: normally, if you grant a license to government, you may not be able to sue for a violation because governments can be immune from legal claims. We ask recipients to waive this restriction, so there is a remedy if the recipient does not abide by the terms of the license. See Section 9.2 of the OPL"
And:
"The OSET Foundation (then the “OSDV Foundation”) attained its full tax-exempt status under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code declaring us a public charity in the 3rd quarter of 2013. In the course of seeking this status, as part of a negotiation⁴, we agreed to make certain changes to the license to ensure that our source code is free for everyone to use. Section 5.3 of the 2.0 license now requires that a licensee who does not abide by the terms of the license must make the Covered Software available in Source Code Form on a publicly available computer network for a period of no less than three (3) years.
This goes beyond the source code delivery requirements of standard open source licenses. Section 5.4 reserves the ability of a licensor under our license to seek injunctive relief for violation of the terms of the license. It is not clear at this point whether a court could, under applicable law, order a violator to release source code. But we cannot control the law, only our license. Therefore, if that remedy is available under law, we want to make sure it is available under our license as well."
You can read more about this license here:
http://www.osetfoundation.org/public-license
And here: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2015-September/002568.html

• Transcopyright Licensing: You can listen to Ted Nelson explain about this here: https://youtu.be/x3l7CpnpyGw

• The Eclipse Public License, which, among other things, covers an important point related to software patent licensing, which you can read about here: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4032/what-does-it-mean-to-license-a-patent-to-software

• The Mozilla Public License, which you can read about here: http://veldstra.org/2016/12/09/you-should-choose-mpl2-for-your-opensource-project.html

I don't advocate for any specific one of these licenses, as I find myself frustrated with all of them, and nobody seems to have yet made a license successfully hybridizing all the individual ideas from all of these licenses.

Now that there's actually a license, it seems sensible to suggest this. And @riko-k's fbst package is already there:

https://cran.r-project.org/package=fbst

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03332

One may find details on the CRAN submission process here:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/policies.html