Why GNU License?

Dev
2

This page makes a pretty compelling case for just picking Plain Old GPL:

  • GPL-incompatible licenses risk lack of support (GPL most popular)
  • Other projects show GPL compatibility important
  • GPL is very well understood legally by now

Remember virtually every other forum software either costs money (is not 100% open source) or sucks, or both.

Mostly, I’d say we are doing GPL because:

  1. WordPress is our spirit guide, and they do it. Our elevator pitch is basically that we aim to be the WordPress of forums. Do you see WordPress failing or not getting adoption because of GPL? I don’t. Quite the opposite.

  2. We do want to incentivize people to contribute back to make it better. We give fantastic forum software to you for free, and in return, you contribute any cool stuff you did with it back to the project so it gets better and raises the level of Civilized Discourse on the Internet for everyone. Quid pro quo, Clarice. Quid pro quo.

  3. We need to retain an original license to any contributed code via a CLA so we can sell “enterprisey” versions. In addition to hosting one-click forum instances here at discourse.org for $49 - $199 a month, we also plan to sell the software to big companies for big bucks. That’s how we hope to pay our salaries in 2 years’ time.

  4. What specific problem does choosing GPL cause, other than “personally, I prefer a different license?” Tons of GPL software out there doing great – WordPress and to some extent Drupal are close relations of ours, and both are GPL. It’s a very well understood and extremely popular license. Can you point to any other vaguely-related-to-forums GPL software that were harmed as a result of choosing GPL?

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