







A blog about open source licensing
Licenses – Open Source Initiative
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Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.

Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft
Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead
Boris Mann's digital garden and personal site.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …

Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source - Adam Jacob, System Initiative

Licensing terms for data in the Atmosphere
I’d like to raise a fun and interesting topic, and that’s intellectual property and content licensing. The data that flies around the Atmosphere is all visible and public. We’re at a stage within the Atmosphere where services are beginning to grow, and we’re beginning to see lexicons and data that express creative works that extend in length beyond microblogging. I think that the Standard.site lexicons are a great example. But these creations lead to further questions. Who has permission to...

RSL: Really Simple Licensing
The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet
Mx. Aria Stewart (@aredridel@kolektiva.social)
I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.
Introducing the Functional Source License: Freedom without Free-riding
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL). Last year we purchased Codecov, and a few months ago we published it under BSL/BUSL as well. That led to some vigorous debate because of our use of the term “Open Source” to describe Codecov, from which emerged this helpful suggestion from Adam Jacob, co-founder of Chef:

CopyFair License - P2P Foundation
= a type of licensing or agreement that aims to re-introduce the principle and practice of reciprocity in markets that use mutualized knowledge (commons), by regulating contributions to these commons for those that commercialize it