Ask HN: What OSS license should I choose? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What OSS license should I choose?

5 pointslinkdd5 comments

Hello HN,

I'm currently working on Letlang[0] as a side project, TLDR: this is a general purpose programming language which compiles to Rust.

Right now, the repository is not open-source, mainly because I have not chosen a license yet.

Most of the time, I release softwares or libraries under the terms of the MIT license, because I do not really care about who can use the code. Sometimes I release them under the terms of the Apache Public License 2.0, when I care about the name but still not about who can use the code.

I'm wondering if this software should be released under the terms of the GPL (2 or 3? i don't know), I want to keep things open, included external contributions, so this seems like a good fit.

What I'm not sure about is about the "contamination" of the GPL:

  - does the templates I use to generate Rust code would "contaminate" the produced code? (I don't want to)
  - does the runtime crate I link statically with the generated Rust code would "contaminate" the final library/executable? (I don't want to)

If the answer is yes to the previous questions, then the GPL would be a bad fit. Then, what license should I use?

Thank you in advance HN :)

[0] - https://letlang.dev

Tough call. For me, if I were doing a programming language, I'd probably go with the Apache License or something. I like the GPL and other copyleft licenses, but don't want to deal with the confusion around "Are binaries produced by the compiler bound to be GPL'd" kind of questions. I think GCC even ships with a "GPL + some special extra verbiage" license if memory serves correctly. Me, I don't want to deal with "special extra verbiage" because I'm lazy. But it really depends on your ideals / goals and what-not.

If it helps, there are a couple of (free) books out there that run through a lot of explanations of different OSS licenses and the benefits and tradeoffs of each.

https://people.debian.org/~dktrkranz/legal/Understanding%20O...

https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

There's also "Producing OSS" which may be of interest to you:

https://producingoss.com/

Thank you for the links, I'll read them carefully :)

> but don't want to deal with the confusion around "Are binaries produced by the compiler bound to be GPL'd" kind of questions.

I'd like to avoid this as well :) But at the same time, I have a feeling that it would be best if all work done on the Letlang compiler could be OSS.

You're going to hit the religious wars on this one, but for me basically all code goes under Apache 2 to maximise freedom of people to use that code for any purpose, likewise Solderpad for electronics and CC0 for data where I can. If you want your stuff to be used, rather than getting glory for it, the most liberal licence possible is likely to help IMHO.

> all code goes under Apache 2 to maximise freedom of people to use that code for any purpose

GPL do not prevent using the code for commercial reasons, does it? IIRC, it just ensure that any derivative work is open-sourced as well. Which I would like to.

> rather than getting glory for it

It's really not about the glory, but more about ensuring that work done on the compiler can come back upstream, so that every one can benefit from it.

Usually I don't mind it, but in this case, if someone can do this better than me, I'd love to be able to learn from it.

GPL prevents use in commercial or other applications where it is not then appropriate to share the resulting code. I prefer to allow such uses. For example, for some years there were a handful of lines of code of mine in a phone system helping munge JPEGs not to crash some receiving phones. My original code was Apache 2 (or BSD-like), telco was clearly not going to publish their switch source code, world was a better place. Would not have been legit with GPL original. But people feel very strongly about this stuff.

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