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Comment by waseemsadiq | Hacker News Reader

Thanks thats helpfull, I'll add a licence tonight (probably BSD)

Note that BSD does allow "some dude in china [to] slap another name on it and sell it".

Yes, but they have to give credit back. Better than nothing - people can follow the trail.

I don't believe this is true. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses indicates nothing about an attribution requirement.

  * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

  * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

They just have to bury the license in the documentation somewhere. Who reads documentation?

Yeah but at least if he goes BSD then he too can use this code in a commercial product.

Huh?! If he's the copyright holder, he can license the code under whatever license he chooses and use his code in a commercial product if he wishes.

Ok I think I read you, but lets say his new commercial product was proprietary; the product costs $100. If the license for his original Inbox2 product was GPL, he would be required to distribute the source code on his new product right? So my point is, if its a BSD license he can integrate that code into the $100 product and not have to share the source code. I'm no software license expert so if I'm mistaken please correct me here.

IANAL either, but I still think he'd be free to use his original code in a commercial product. By releasing under GPL, you give others a limited license to redistribute and modify the software subject to some conditions, but you keep all your rights, and you are free to distribute proprietary versions of the code.

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAnd...

correct.

Ooooooohhhh neat, OK that makes GPL a whole lot more attractive then. Assumption destroyed; paradigm expanded. Thank-you.

You might also find the Artistic License interesting -

http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0

It's an interesting balance between freedom and giving back - may be more suited to what you want or may not.

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