Paul Chilton

There are a lot of open source licenses available, and when I looked at how to open source a couple of web applications the obvious choices seemed to be either the BSD or the GPL.

The first thing people seem to do is try out a web application. If it looks interesting enough, download and install it on a convenient host. If they really like it, they might start looking at themes, plugins and customizations. Which they can opt to share with the community.

This is something that should be encouraged in a helpful and positive way.

However, what happens if people don’t want to share with the community? They might want to keep their changes in house to start with, possibly distributing them at a later date.

Under the GPL, you are obliged to provide sources if you distribute binaries to anyone. So things like a packed distribution would include customizations. But since its a web based application, there is nothing forcing people to distribute it. The GPL doesn’t have practical enforcement (under version 2 at least) for changes made to a web application to be made available to the community.

Under BSD, you can do a lot more with the code. Including keeping your customizations to yourself, distributing packages as you like. There is a lot more freedom to do what you want with the code. Might as well start out with the code with more freedoms in place.

There is the GNU affero GPL which is a variant that ensures distributing of code for whenever a web application is made available to the public. It does provide for more freedom for the code, but less for the users to be involved in Open Source at their own pace.