Decide which licences we want to use

[tulku]

@dreamster/comunity-council we need to decide which licenses we want to use:

• we could use something with copyleft (like GPL or CC Share Alike) for the hardware
• I guess we don't want to force all the code to be free.

I think this is the first decision the @dreamster/comunity-council should do!

[MisaelK]

I believe copyleft is essential. It allows the free community to prosper (as indicated in the "what is Copyleft?" GNU document), which is certainly of importance here. GPLv3 and CC BY-SA look like acceptable choices.

Now, bear in mind hardware also means patents. With what I've read, the TAPR Open Hardware Licence seems to provide better coverage against patent trolls, and I think this would be the better choice for hardware and design documents.

For the software, GPLv3 is the way to go, for the reasons mentioned before.

[tulku]

These are very good comments. Probably to simplify the selection process we could do it in steps:

1. Decide if we want copyleft or not
2. Decide if we want the same license for everything (soft, hard, etc)
3. Decide which licenses.

I'm also inclined of using a copyleft license. We want to encourage more people joining the community than big companies using our code. Copyleft will give a sense of protection to the work the community does. Something without copyleft will make commercial adoption more friction less.

I would not use GPLv3 for everything. I would use LGPL for libraries and GPL for examples and complete projects. This simplifies a bit the adoption of the dreamster libraries.

For the hardware, I do want something with Copyleft and I heard good things about the TAPR license, however, it is very unknown and scares a bit. Probably CC Share Alike is a less frightening license (more well known).

It's also interesting to look at the license model Arduino uses:

• Hardware CC SA
• Libraries LGPL
• Arduino IDE: GPL

Please @dreamster/comunity-council, I think this is an important issue that will be difficult to change in the future. Ask all your doubts and make all the comments you want!