[Ubuntu-be] [ot] welke licentie? / which license ?

[François Cauwe]

Hello

Op zondag 22-06-2008 om 14:01 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Y P:
> A friend of mine is busy with some projects; herefore he'd like to publish
> something that we may use in the opensource world, but he'd like to make
> derivate or alternate products from it and get some financial fee with it:
> which license is the good one, bsd? others?
> where to find a good juridic advisor in Belgium?

Your friend can license his work under any license even the GPL (which
is the best license if it is an standalone application imho) and still
keep the right to relicense his work later under other terms (such as
closed source software) _as long as he has the full rights over the hole
program_.

Secondly he should be carefull with de dependency's he uses, he can't
use GPL licensed libs if he want to keep a closed version of his
software and ask that all external contributors give him the right over
their contributions. I think some big FS-company's use this approach
(Qt, Open Office, mysql, ...)

If he uses GPL and accept external contribution he can't relicense his
work, but he can still sell his opensource software. The mayor problem
is that all modification should be made public, which customers maybe
won't always want to have...

François