Daniel Chalef

KnowledgeTree Open Source Licensing: GPL, CPAL, OSL ?

As mentioned in a previous post, we’re in the market for a new open source license for KnowledgeTree. The open source licensing landscape has changed dramatically since we decided to license KnowledgeTree out under the KnowledgeTree Public License. Many of us at KnowledgeTree are, now more than ever, concerned about license proliferation, the dilution/fuzzying of what it means to be “open source” and ensuring that the commercial open source business side of our business continues to foster a strong open source community.

So, what has changed? After much to and fro-ing and several false starts, the Open Source Initiative recently approved the Common Public Attribution License. Last week, the OSI board approved the GPL v3 and LGPL v3. A good time for us to review our licensing strategy and move to an OSI approved license.
We recently spent some time workshopping what we want our open source license to do. The next step is to determine a good license match for our “wish list”.

The KnowledgeTree Open Source licensing “Wish List”

** denotes a non-negotiable “wish”

• foster/support as big and vibrant a community as possible

• a recognised license (widely used, accepted, certified by OSI, a known entity to “exit” investors) **

• supports “sharing” of code, knowledge, skills, time (we felt that this meant a more copyleft and less permissive license) **

• promotes and supports our commercial dual-licensing strategy

• strongly copyleft and less permissive **

• supports a “suitable” level of attribution **

• has a clear and broad definition of “redistribution” (i.e. what is found in Larry Rosen’s Open Software License or the Affero GPL’s “network use” provision)

• Manages our liability and indemnifies us against all the usual stuff we don’t want to be exposed to **

• Must be a generic license and not require modification to be utilized by us (i.e. must not be specific to a particular open source project such as the Mozilla or Apache Foundations). **
• Manage patent issues and protect against patent trolls and the like **

• It must have a clearly defined jurisdiction for interpretation and preferably would already have been legally “tested” in some way (court action, a significant body of legal knowledge etc) **

And, drum roll, the Candidate Licenses put forward by our team were as follows:
Candidate Licenses
KPL
CPAL
GPL v3.0
Open Software License
GPL v2
LGPL
Apache
New BSD License

We felt that some of the candidate licenses that were put forward did not make our “non-negotiable” list and were disqualified.

So we’re in the process of evaluating the remaining licenses against our criteria and hope to have an answer Real Soon Now(tm)!