The
Wide Open LicenseI'm kind of bringing this over from a
thread in the Developer's Corner... It's kind of related as this license does a nice job of saying why the GPL is isn't useful in some circumstances:
Consider, for example, if you had a embedded software application project consisting of 75% of your own specialized, proprietary software combined with 25% generic, free/open software. If the latter uses the GPL, your 75% now becomes free and open. But since that doesn't make any business sense, you and your team decide instead that it's just a lot easier to reinvent that 25% of the wheel yourself.
You can see in this example, that the use of the GPL has had the net effect of discouraging the use of otherwise-useful open-source software in an inherently commercial/closed application. So, rather than provide users with "freedom", the GPL has, in fact, inadvertantly "restricted" them from using it. You then have to re-invent the wheel--which is just plain wasteful.
Therefore, for commercial projects, a license with more "freedom" is needed. Rather than free the software, the WOL frees the user. (And let's face it, who deserves freedom more: the software or its user?!) Instead of assuring that "anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it", the WOL assumes we live in a more benign world in which enlightened self-interest leads people to voluntarily share significant improvements with the community when that makes sense, or else they just quietly ship their tailored code. (And that really doesn't hurt anybody.)
We believe that making open-source software easy in a legal sense will open up its use. We call this principle "wide open".
Very nicely put.
In any event, it's an interesting license that kind of reminds me a bit of the
WTFPL...
(A license that is definitely NSFW.)
