On Tue, 2010-06-29 at 02:20 +0200, João Pais wrote:
Hello all,
I'm doing last touches in a Pd patch that is a general tool to make click tracks. That can (and hopefully will) be used by any musicians, such as instrumentalists, conductors, composers, ...
The patch is/will be available free of charge, only paypal donations are accepted (or suggested). But I'm considering using a different license than the general BSD license I usually ship my abstractions with. Since it's a rather complex patch (and if I get any grants to continue to work on it, it might get even more complex), I would prefer for people not to edit it too much - although most of the people using it won't be able even to open the gop. Another aspect is to prevent anyone to grab the code and do a commercial version of it. Not that it will happen anytime soon, but it might be a possibility.
a) I hear you would like to be able to distribute your patch. b) A Pd patch is not easily turned into closed-source for technical reasons.
So in this case it's probably the easiest to take 'die Flucht nach vorn' a.k.a making sure, that your patch stays open. This is what the GPL is most suitable for, I think.
I was thinking of instead the BSD to use a CC license, the "Attribution No Derivatives" one - http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/.
Hm.. this makes the GPL unsuitable again. However, I do believe that the CC licenses are more suitable for artistic works (not that a computer program also can be an artistic work!), where a 'no derivatives' clause makes more sense, because a derivative work might change the context of the original oeuvre thus possibly changing the meaning of the original work completely, which the original creator might like to avoid. In terms of software, since you have only little control over how people adapt your patch for their own use (and of course, they probably _would_ like to change at least a tiny thing and forcing them to ask you first adds an imho unnecessary layer of bureaucracy), I suggest that the best options for you (and also for your users) is to 'pro-actively' allow them to make changes. The most important part is the 'attribution' clause, which is covered by both CC and GPL, iirc.
Roman