I feel there should be a LICENSE file in the flash proxy client packages currently at http://www.bamsoftware.com/dist/flashproxy/. What is the recommended practice? Right now the files carry no license. I would be happy with anything that is free software and convenient to the Tor Project. For example the 3-clause BSD used by obfsproxy is fine. I am pretty sure that I wrote all the code that is in use at this point.
David Fifield
Thus spake David Fifield (david@bamsoftware.com):
I feel there should be a LICENSE file in the flash proxy client packages currently at http://www.bamsoftware.com/dist/flashproxy/. What is the recommended practice? Right now the files carry no license. I would be happy with anything that is free software and convenient to the Tor Project. For example the 3-clause BSD used by obfsproxy is fine. I am pretty sure that I wrote all the code that is in use at this point.
I once wrote a whole article on choosing the best free software license as an exercise, and then I heard Roger sum it up in exactly two point five sentences:
"If your widget is the only thing of its kind in the world, and you really want it to exist in any form no matter what, you should pick BSD/MIT/X11.
Otherwise, if your widget is merely a replacement widget for similar closed source widgets, and you'd like to ensure that your widget always remains in existence as the free one, choose GPL/MPL/etc.
[Also, GPL can be hella annoying to change in the future once you have merged patches from other contributors. Make total destroy the Copyright State.]"
Ok, so he didn't say that last bit in that exact way, but I think he meant most of it. If your widget ends up being so awesome that you exterminate all other things like it, you might end up wishing you hadn't made it GPL... Of course though, then you might just end up exploited by Steve Jobs once he (or his likeness) has been defrosted from Alcor.. And nobody wants that...
Personally, I would go BSD/MIT/X11 and just know that if you ever made a closed source version, nobody would or should trust it. Max freedom ftw? YMMV.
[Also, GPL can be hella annoying to change in the future once you have merged patches from other contributors. Make total destroy the Copyright State.]"
Personally I go with GPL for my projects. Here's how I'm trying to address the above and keep the flexibility to change it in the future... https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/stem#CopyrightforPatches
On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 02:50:44PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
I feel there should be a LICENSE file in the flash proxy client packages currently at http://www.bamsoftware.com/dist/flashproxy/. What is the recommended practice? Right now the files carry no license. I would be happy with anything that is free software and convenient to the Tor Project. For example the 3-clause BSD used by obfsproxy is fine. I am pretty sure that I wrote all the code that is in use at this point.
I did the Expat license.
https://gitweb.torproject.org/flashproxy.git/commitdiff/ecf1bd0a https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat
(This is what is usually referred to as the "MIT license," but I once submitted a package to the Free Software Directory, and they said that in order to avoid horrible confusion I shouldn't call it that.)
David Fifield
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