Why are you using the wrong licence?

I frequently see posts/articles/screeds asking why people don’t contribute to open source. If it’s important that recipients of open source software contribute upstream, and you are angry when they don’t, why use licences like MIT, Apache, GPL or BSD that don’t require upstream collaboration?

Back in the day, Apple released their public source code under version 1 of the Apple Public Source Licence, which required users who changed the source to fill in a form notifying Apple of their changes. You could do the same, and not be angry.

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One Response to Why are you using the wrong licence?

  1. Janis Gertulla says:

    But the usage of such a license would scare off big companies to use your code in a modified version and give your project free publicity. If nobody knows about your work then noone can contribute to it.

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