{"id":506,"date":"2013-02-03T22:45:40","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T22:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=506"},"modified":"2023-07-10T18:19:34","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T17:19:34","slug":"should-digital-preservation-tools-be-released-under-the-gnu-general-public-license","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/should-digital-preservation-tools-be-released-under-the-gnu-general-public-license\/","title":{"rendered":"Shouldn’t digital preservation tools be released under the GNU General Public License?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me, this is a\u00a0first foray into understanding software licensing…<\/p>\n

Licensing bores me. If I’ve written code and it is somewhere out there in\u00a0public view and I haven’t licensed it, you can take it from me that you can pretty\u00a0much do what you want with it – but please try to be fair in your attribution.<\/p>\n

I’ve met the people who are most likely to have an aneurysm over\u00a0whether a piece of software is licensed correctly for their own use and I’m\u00a0not going to lose sleep over them, and as for passive\u00a0aggressive\u00a0open\u00a0source developers who complain<\/a>: “Oh, look, it’s another github\/bitbucket project without an open source license. That means, friends, it is not to be used…<\/em>” – write an email to the developer, ask them for their terms and to update their source code – it’s not that difficult! (N.B:<\/strong> The irony of my approach in the last two sentences is not lost on me.)<\/p>\n

Yep. This stuff bores me. I write this with two licenses in my GitHub repositories –\u00a0Beerware<\/a> and zlib<\/a>\u00a0– and\u00a0that probably says more about ego (or low self-esteem!) than anything.\u00a0More accurately, I’m quite aware that I simply haven’t written anything particularly innovative or useful that warrants more complicated licensing documentation.<\/p>\n

The digital preservation\u00a0community, however, might have<\/em>! And that’s the crux of my question.<\/p>\n

Shouldn’t digital preservation tools be released under the GNU General Public License?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In researching the license used by a tool<\/a>, similar in nature\u00a0to the one I am currently working on<\/a>, I notice that it is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License –\u00a0LGPL<\/a>. I have no qualms about that. I simply noticed the GNU’s link: ‘Why you shouldn’t use the Lesser GPL for your next library<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

If you’re not familiar with the text, you should take a look. The GNU make some interesting arguments:<\/p>\n

If we amass a collection of powerful GPL-covered libraries that have no parallel available to proprietary software, they will provide a range of useful modules to serve as building blocks in new free programs. This will be a significant advantage for further free software development, and some projects will decide to make software free in order to use these libraries. University projects can easily be influenced; nowadays, as companies begin to consider making software free, even some commercial projects can be influenced in this way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And:<\/p>\n

“We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other’s free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given that the tools we will write in our field will nearly almost always be unique and have an edge over proprietary alternatives it leads me to ask: Shouldn’t we release all of our tools to be used only in free software?<\/p>\n

The benefits seem clear:<\/p>\n