TWiki Plugin Licensing Issue

monsieur_champs has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, fellow monks.

I just released a LDAP password changer plugin for use with TWiki Wiki Wiki implementation, but I'm not sure about what license I'm using, or if I need to specify what license I would like it to use. Being a plugin, I guess its not into the main code, nor is subject for the TWiki's main license. This way, I still have a choice, and can assign a specific license to the plugin. I would like to know what the Monks think about releasing the plugin in "the same license as TWiki itself" or in "GPL" or "LGPL" or even "BSD" license.

Thank you very much in advance for your suggestions and opinions.

-- monsieur_champs

Comment on TWiki Plugin Licensing Issue

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: TWiki Plugin Licensing Issue by waswas-fng (Curate) on Jun 09, 2004 at 15:05 UTC
As a general rule, if you want your work to ever be distributed on a large scale you will want to use a license that is either the same license as the product you plug into or a license that is more open. If you do not care about distribution, use any license you want to -- its a personal preference (as long as you are not tied to a license via how you interoperate with the app). -Waswas	[reply]
Re: TWiki Plugin Licensing Issue by monsieur_champs (Curate) on Jun 09, 2004 at 18:01 UTC
Fellow waswas-fng I'm not a lawer and allways had problems with laws. The official license of TWiki is BSD, I guess. How does this affect me on choosing GPL, for example? What do you recommend about this? I have many doubts, and no guidelines (yet). As the tool is perl-based, I guess the Monastery could help. I would love to see my tool widelly used, and have no restrictions on distribuition. But I won't like evil things like the RedHat new business position, "closing" the distro. I don't want this for my tool. Thank you very much for you advice -- monsieur_champs	[reply]
OT: Red Hat by Errto (Vicar) on Jun 10, 2004 at 03:01 UTC
I would love to see my tool widelly used, and have no restrictions on distribuition. But I won't like evil things like the RedHat new business position, "closing" the distro. I don't want this for my tool. I'm sorry, I don't like pointless arguments, but I can't let that stand. "Closing" a distro sounds to me like they took code that used to be open source and are now distributing it as proprietary only. They've done no such thing. They continue to host (and fund) the Fedora Project, and moreover SRPMs for their enterprise distro are available, and you can even get them in packaged form from White Box et al. In fact, were you to purchase it you could re-distribute the entire thing for free, minus certain trademarked images. That's the beauty of open source.	[reply]
Re^2: TWiki Plugin Licensing Issue by waswas-fng (Curate) on Jun 09, 2004 at 18:15 UTC
I am not a lawyer either. So as long as your entire app is your own you should be able to release with GPL. If you use some of the code from the parent app in your app you may be stuck with BSD (as it needs to have the BSD license and copyright notice included in distributed source and binaries) -- If it is a concern you can contact a lawyer or maybe seek advice from the license advocates of what ever license you are drawn to. -Waswas	[reply]