
Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions - WoodenKatana
https://whitessource.com/top-open-source-licenses-trends-and-predictions
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pombreda
What is the basis for these stats? new projects? new repos? new files? new
commits? the lack of details makes me wonder.

~~~
Semaphor
The older post [0] has some info:

> Our research team analyzed our database of over 3M open source components
> and 70M source files, covering 22 programming languages.

[0]: [https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-
whitesource/t...](https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-
whitesource/top-10-open-source-software-licenses-of-2016-and-key-trends)

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Kovah
Aside from the stats, which are not really surprising, I still find it very
hard to get my head around licensing and I bet that this is the main reason
why MIT is used. MIT is indeed the only license that is really understandable.

The mentioned choosealicense.com is not really helpful with choosing a license
because it not really explains all the legal terms used, in my opinion. There
are many blog articles out there but to this day I couldn't find a single
overview that describes each of the major licenses in a regular-human way. And
this overview is what I would need. Simple language, tailored to the most
important questions: copyright, attribution, what can both non-commercial and
commercial users do and what not, and what are my rights as the owner. If you
have any resources on this please share it!

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brudgers
The only way to understand the fundamentals of licensing is to hire a lawyer.
Because if you are unwilling to hire a lawyer, it doesn't matter how you
license the software or whether you license it or not. The only person who can
enforce the license for your software is you. And that requires paying
lawyers. If you really care about what people do with your code, closed source
is the way to go.

On the other hand, the big difference between licenses is how easy it is to
incorporate contributions. That is why Linux thrived under GPL. It's why the
formality of Apache's process is well suited for corporate contributions where
participation will be vetted by the legal department...and why Apache is less
suited for an ecosystem like Javascript.

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antirez
> Changes to licensing in leading open source projects like Mongo DB and Redis
> are reminders that...

That the author should do their homeworks and get the facts right. Redis is
BSD licensed for 10 years now. Redis modules by Redis Labs, never a part of
the Redis core, changed license.

Article flagged because I can excuse a casual commenter here but if you write
an article about OSS licensing and are not able to show facts in the correct
way, for me there is no place on the HN top positions.

~~~
germanier
If you choose to profit off a common brand you also have to live with the
fallout of that choice. You can't use the Redis name only when it's convenient
and say "but that's not real Redis" else.

Those "Redis" named products were open source and now are not.

~~~
antirez
To be honest in the community it is crystal clear what "Redis" refers to,
there could be confusion about the project organization itself versus the
company (Redis / Redis Labs), but people now that Redis is what they normally
use, download from Github and so forth. So there are no excuses.

~~~
brudgers
I don't have a dog in the fight. I'm just reading the article casually. I
understand the point you are making and have some sense of why Redis has the
license structure it has. I don't have any criticism of it. I'm glad for its
success.

The description of Redis would be out of place in an article about Redis. For
an article about licensing, the statements about Redis are not a terrible way
of pointing out that there are a myriad of flavors in the world of open
source. The description has cosign similarity not relational calculus's
exactitude. But I still see why it might elicit your response.

Anyway, thanks for all the fish.

