On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:50 AM, Elliott Slaughter elliottslaughter@gmail.com wrote:
My *biased* recommendation is the MIT licence http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php, but whatever suits *your* needs is fine: in the absence of a public notice on the clnet site, assume that any license which fulfills DFSG http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines is fine.
Thanks for the advice. Any particular reason you like the MIT license? (I know MIT is less restrictive than the GPL, but I really don't know much more than that.)
MIT is essentially the same as releasing things into public domain, in the sense that it does not restrict users ability to do anything they want with the code -- including stealing it. I am not interested in telling people what they are and are not allowed to do.
GPL restricts users ability to use code in circumstances where releasing the sources of the aggregate is not a possibility. Also: the moment you accept a GPL licenced *contribution* you cannot relicence without getting agreement from all contributors. Hence, GPL projects are almost never relicenced -- and almost always it happens, it can be asked if the relicencing was legally sound: Joe Random Hacker who contributed a few patched two years back might not have been consulted.
Itent of LGPL is nice: don't steal this code, but it won't contaminate anything. Unfortunately LGPL has plenty of language that doesn't make sense for Lisp. If you want LGPL like effect, use GPL plus the classpath exception (or something like that), and hope your and your users lawyers agree.
(All GPL and LGPL comments above are re. version 2 -- I am not familiar with the new versions.)
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus