Paying Attention to Your License

A few thoughts on licensing today:

A quick look at Ruby Forge will show that the Ruby community tends to be about evenly split between the MIT license, the GPL, and the Ruby License. Rails is under the MIT in case you’re wondering (you mean you wrote that web 2.0 app without checking the license?).

The Ruby License is a dual-license. First, it includes the option to license under the GPL. The second license is more akin to the MPL or LGPL which requires changes to the original code remain open while allowing incorporation into a larger re-licensed work.

While it’s a small detail, one of the things that bothers me about re-using the Ruby License for other Ruby code is that it wasn’t intended to be re-used. Look at the license. It specifically mentions files included in the Matz’s Ruby interpreter. It talks about reading in scripts and libraries and distributing object code, characteristics of Matz’s code but not characteristic of your typical Ruby gem. It’s also not OSI approved, but that’s a technicality.

Still, I wonder how many Ruby developers are licensing their work without reading the Ruby license. When you’re working for a software company, you don’t worry about licensing. That’s someone else’s job. But open source developers who are licensing their own work need to be aware of the implications of their license of choice.

I don’t have anything against the Ruby License per se. But the increase of popularity (or hype ) around Ruby will probably mean we’ll see more and more people using the Ruby License, whether they understand it or not.