[plt-scheme] input requested from people who care about licenses of scheme libraries

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 01:15:32PM -0500, Grant Rettke wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 4:18 AM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
> > I'm thinking of distributing most of my *new* Scheme libraries of under the
> > more restrictive GPL 3 or AGPL 3 licenses.  (I plan to keep new versions of
> > existing libraries under their existing licenses.)
> >
> > My original motivation for picking LGPL 2.1 over GPL 2.1 is that I thought
> > LGPL was the best way to promote use of Scheme in my own small way.  With
> > Scheme now having good name-recognition among software techies, Scheme has
> > less need of help.
> 
> Open-source is the right way to promote Scheme, and at this stage in
> the game LGPL or BSD is the right way to do it.
> 
> The great thing about LGPL and BSD is that if people want to share
> their changes, they will form communities and do so. If they can't or
> don't want to share changes, they don't. You get the most bang for the
> buck since the license alone is not the primary motivator for being
> open, it is the value of the software.

One little-known variation is the wxwindows licence (perhaps now
renemed to WxWidgets?)  It's :GPL with one extr permission -- the 
permission to distribute linked binaries without source code.

This might satisfy certain commercial customers, while still allowing 
quite free open-source distribution. 

-- hendrik