Hrm, well licensing can become a contentious topic among SW engineers, but hopefully this thread won't... On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Wouter van Ooijen wrote: >> For the license, I can't add anything to my "utility belt" that isn't >> BSD, Apache, MIT, or similar, and even these cause problems with some >> clients and their lawyers. =A0It generally takes less time to develop >> new software than it does to fight such battles, so if it's not a very >> liberal license it's not going to get much attention from me. > > Slightly hyjacking this thread: which license is in your experience the > most acceptable to the lawyers you have dealt with? No license is best (ie, it's simply part of the existing contractual agreement to develop software), then a customized license for them (ie, grant COMPANY A unlimited irrevocable non-exclusive etc, etc, etc - used for generic libraries I develop prior to and during the development of their software that I will also use elsewhere), and then if there's no other choice it appears that the Apache is most lawyer friendly. It's more verbose than the BSD and MIT/X11 (which some see as a bit loosey-goosey) which feature a lack of protections, liability, etc notation. They don't like those licenses either, but they accept that there's a cost-benefit ratio for some things such as TCP/IP stacks or cryptography software where developing, testing, and maintaining one yourself (or buying and integrating a commercial solution) will take more resources than chunking it through the legal machinery. I talked a bit about this in this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40100/apache-licence-vs-bsd-vs-mit/40184= #40184 The answer after that one points out another big advantage (to the corporate world) of the Apache license - it explicitly grants patent licenses along with the software, which further limits a company's exposure to lawsuits regarding the software. -Adam -- = http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist