When I was doing a licensing survey in the Fedora ecosystem. I asked a few developers, "What is license according to them?" I got some interesting answers:
"I do not care about the license; it bores me." - a super senior developer says this. (not a very good example to follow)
"You have to fill up the name of a license to make the package in Fedora unless they won't accept the package" (sadly)
"License is something that protects your code." (Ahh finally some optimism)
The answer appeared as a ray of hope to me that yes, there are developers (still) who do care about code ( both their code and law).
But most of the developers (if not all) see licenses as long, huge legal documents filled with complicated words and some never-ending sentences. There are certain tags that people tend to associate with licenses like: MIT is permissive, GPL is strict, BSD is secure. Instead of going through the license document itself, developers choose the license for their project; based on these mental tags, they tag to it.
From today I am going to start a series to explaining different kinds of software licenses. The series will translate legalese into English. Together we will try to understand the Licenses and it's permissions one by one.
from Planet Python
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