Which license should be chosen as the agreement for open source software has been plagued by many developers and companies. Now some lawyers have given answers with very clear opinions and very precise conclusions.
On October 17th, at the open source legal evangelism forum of "You Have My Open Source Festival", Ladas&Parry Law Firm and Chief Representative of China Wang Dongfang said that if it is system, tool, or interface code, choose GPL license (Including GPL, LGPL, AGPL) is often very wise, can unite more developers to modify the software code to better quality.
Wang Dongfang's topic that day was "Open Source License Selection-Talking from Hongmeng OS". The Hongmeng OS kernel is open sourced with the BSD-3-Clause protocol, and most of the other components use Apache 2.0. Wang Dongfang believes that if Huawei is more aggressive, using GPL-like licenses may help Hongmeng gain more support from global developers.
In Wang Dongfang’s view, Linux has achieved such great success because on the one hand it is the earliest high-quality code. On the other hand, the GPL license may also play a greater role. “GPL licenses are very powerful. Strong, only under such a license can we make the common system so good."
Talking about the current license selection of enterprise open source projects, Wang Dongfang revealed that many companies she has contacted are talking about open source, especially this year, and received more corporate inquiries than the previous five years combined. During this period, Wang Dongfang also felt the fear of GPL within the company, and the company was worried that GPL would infect self-developed code.
In fact, even if companies use GPL in the R&D process, they can also avoid infection in some ways. Wang Dongfang introduced that the GPL allows packaging on the basis of the software licensed under the GPL, and it can also be called through standard interfaces, or the modules of the program can be separated from each other using dynamic links to form independent files to distinguish codes. Form a ethos, don’t just talk about the GPL. If you feel that your core code needs to be distinguished from the code under the GPL license, you can consult open source or legal experts to find a solution instead of ignoring the GPL."