Licenses & legalese

Add-ons Development
#1

I started working on addons about 2 years ago and have released about a dozen. I’m also a professional and hobby software dev (add website dev and such to that too) IRL, working for a java development company. As a result, I’ve written programs in other languages and made websites too, and soon want to release a big program I wrote in java and sell it for money for a change.

The big problem with all that stuff I love to do is the one that became most apparent when I started publishing addons: the freaking licences. I don’t understand zilch about them, and even with the relative simplicity of firefox addons, it’s still an incomprehensible load of legalese. Even when I look them up on tldrlegal.com, it’s still a confusing mess of unclear requirements, a load of legal jargon, unclear consequences regarding what users and other devs can and can’t do, etc.

When applied to firefox addons, what do the main licenses listed on AMO actually entail/how do they differ? Which concrete things are allowed or denied under each license? What about updates/new versions, git repos, etc?

#2

Anglosaxon legalese is not too easy to understand and includes several things that are already regulated in law. Anyway, I use the Mozilla licence and made a mention of it in every single file. Also a mention of the add-on that I originally forked. When a copy becomes a modification or a new work is subject to interpretation.
Best to do is to read articles about the various licences, such as Wikipedia.

#3

Yes, software licenses are tricky. It might be easier if you tell us what you want people to be able to do or not to do with your source so we can give you a better idea of which license is okay for you.

A very simple summary is that there are two main categories: free software licenses like the GPL, and open source licenses like the Apache license. Free software licenses require all projects derived from those sources to use the same license. Open source licenses allow derivative projects to be closed source, or even to be sold, without permission from the author (often they require attribution, though). The Mozilla Public License is more on the open source side, but a bit more restrictive than licenses like the Apache one.

Ultimately, most of us are happy if the add-on code is available under some license. It doesn’t need to be the perfect one :slight_smile: , and hopefully you’ll never need to enforce it on others who use your code.

#4

I’ve had a discussion with someone about this and the bottom line seems to be that licenses by themselves are mostly not what I want. I want my code to be fairly protected/owned, and licenses generally serve to do the opposite and make code free to some extent. So yeah, I suppose there’s not much of a choice, just “berne convention” if I wanna get nitpicky or mpl (which is tbh a little too permissive already).

It’s just a difficult thing I want too: I want my source code to be available for viewing at will, copying for review/bugfix/improvement/suggestions/etc purposes, etc, just not that anyone else can just copy-paste my code, change 2 lines and pretend it’s theirs. I don’t want people to just be able to make a fork of my code at will, or release their own “respin” of it (like what happens with linux distros) either.