Re: Licence guidance

What's seemed to work over many years for my Racket open source packages 
(a couple of which are useful things that would be expensive to rewrite) 
is LGPL (initially version 2.x, but lately version 3), plus a statement 
to contact me about other possible licenses.

My thinking was, LGPL suggests the idea of sharing in the same spirit, 
but has very modest limitations that aren't a barrier to most commercial 
use.  At the same time, if someone wanted to make commercial 
inconsistent with even those modest limitations (e.g., make the package 
a closed network service), that was OK, but I'd want some of that money, 
in lieu of common benefit warm-fuzzies.

I don't recall ever being contacted about a different license other than 
LGPL.  Some of my Racket packages are used by an important large 
closed-source production server system, for example, without any 
different license.  (Though, at one point, someone who wanted to 
incorporate my CSV library into an open source something initially 
seemed to be interested in an older version that was LGPLv2 rather than 
v3, perhaps for compatibility with their license at the time, but then 
they quickly straightened that out somehow.)

That said, I don't know whether LGPLv3 is the best default license for 
third-party Racket packages.  Maybe that should be revisited.

Today, Racket hasn't yet taken off commercially nearly as much as it 
might've,[1] and maybe the biggest concern with the licenses of open 
source Racket packages shared altruistically is that we not 
inadvertently lock out some positive later effort (because, e.g., we 
didn't leave a permissive enough license before we went to live off-grid 
on a sunny beach with our Racketeering plunder).

I'm not saying that licenses shouldn't be totally permissive, though, or 
we'd just release everything to the public domain. Racket is pretty 
neat, and, for example, there's still an icky element or two in industry 
that have been known to sabotage projects, and licenses can offer some 
defense.  I think there's little danger of Racket ever being a threat or 
underhanded opportunity to anyone -- but, with all the students around, 
we should try to serve example of good open source licensing, in the 
best spirit of engineering and goodwill.

[1] It's not too late. :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-money/

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