I have many questions concerning FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software), that are not so much focused on “what is the best FOSS app to do X” but more about things like “which licence to chose for what?”, reproducibility or special terms of licences like GPLv3 Anti-Tivoization
Not sure if this or most FOSS related forums are they right place to discuss these questions, although here are many competent people to discuss this topics with, FLOSS development is not rely the focus of this forums, and I think it would be to off topic in many cases.
In the search for places to ask my questions and discuss such things, I mostly found subredits, but I don’t want to use Reddit due to many reason including that it often lags and that it shadowbans me for no reason.
If you know good forums for people interesting in FLOSS development, licencing and related technical stuff, please answer to this thread.
Definitely not an easy topic where people are THAT knowledgeable and know their thing well, at the same time do you really need to go super hard on licences?
What are your use cases that they wouldn’t fit into MIT, AGPL3 or something similar?
I saw a website explaining most of it into easy terms some time ago but I lost the exact name. If you look enough into that topic, you might find it back or something as similar and high quality that would match your needs.
And if you’re doing some real business with money involved, getting a lawyer’s opinion is also a nice way to go.
Its not about finding a niche license to perfectly fit my expectations, but rather how to exactly apply licenses and some special terms of licenses.
For example I would like to know if I need to copy the same licence over and over again in my Notice file like some projects do, or if I can just have ONE copy of each used licence and the just use the SPDX identifier, like I saw it on other projects?
Is it enough to put the SPDX identifier in each l´source file I want to licence or do I need to copy the full header?
If someone makes a pull request to my project, does he automatically agrees to the licensing? Or do I need to get some form of written permission notice?
I never heard of that one either. You hence probably know more than me on that topic altogether.
But I also spent quite some time being around FOSS projects and most of the time, they keep it easy by having a LICENSE in their Git repo, like here
I never saw anything more complex or at least, never really cared watching too deep on that topic to begin with.
If you have some licence like MIT, it doesn’t really matter because they can do whatever anyway.
In case of something a bit more “restrictive”, as far as I know: yes they do automatically agree to the licence if they do submit code via a PR to your project.
Also, having (qualitative) contributions is hard enough, I think that nobody will ever bother imposing a written permission from a random volunteer.
I’d honestly recommend to keep it simple and not worry too much unless you’re doing a very specific corporate product and you do care about competition/IP/patents/etc.
If it’s a side project or something cool/chill with a small impact, it doesn’t really matter. You can moreover always change it later on if your project really starts to pick up some userbase.
A notice file (most times written as NOTICE) is a file where you collect all the attribution, copyright and license notices from all the dependencies or direct copied code you use, as required by nearly any FLOSS license.
Most licenses also specify more about how exactly this file should handled:
For example the ApacheV2 license, section 4 paragraph c and d:
(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works
that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and
attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,
excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of
the Derivative Works; and
(d) If the Work includes a “NOTICE” text file as part of its
distribution, then any Derivative Works that You distribute must
include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained
within such NOTICE file, excluding those notices that do not
pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in at least one
of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed
as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or
documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or,
within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and
wherever such third-party notices normally appear. The contents
of the NOTICE file are for informational purposes only and
do not modify the License. You may add Your own attribution
notices within Derivative Works that You distribute, alongside
or as an addendum to the NOTICE text from the Work, provided
that such additional attribution notices cannot be construed
as modifying the License.
But I need permission to do whatever to, with the code that I would merge.
Yes, the GPL of course automatically applies to anything derivied from it, so of someone makes a contribution to a GPL project without licensing it under GPL, then this would be a direct infringement of the GPL.
When using a permissive license, I would use the ApacheV2, that also states how contribution are licensed:
"Contribution" shall mean any work of authorship, including
the original version of the Work and any modifications or additions
to that Work or Derivative Works thereof, that is intentionally
submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner
or by an individual or Legal Entity authorized to submit on behalf of
the copyright owner. For the purposes of this definition, "submitted"
means any form of electronic, verbal, or written communication sent
to the Licensor or its representatives, including but not limited to
communication on electronic mailing lists, source code control systems,
and issue tracking systems that are managed by, or on behalf of, the
Licensor for the purpose of discussing and improving the Work, but
excluding communication that is conspicuously marked or otherwise
designated in writing by the copyright owner as "Not a Contribution."
"Contributor" shall mean Licensor and any individual or Legal Entity
on behalf of whom a Contribution has been received by Licensor and
subsequently incorporated within the Work.
2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the
Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.
3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,
use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,
where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable
by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)
with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You
institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate
as of the date such litigation is filed.
also
5. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise,
any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work
by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of
this License, without any additional terms or conditions.
Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify
the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed
with Licensor regarding such Contributions.
this can then be combined with a statement in the README file like:
Contributing
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted
for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be
dual licensed as below, without any additional terms or conditions.
You never know how something initially small will develop in the future.
And I want to do everything with licensing correct in the first place so I don’t have to worry about legal stuff later on.
Hopefully, it is still active. StackOverflow is going down by a LOT as of lately.
Not gonna lie, I have no clue about those so feel free to avoid my comments whatsoever in the future on that topic.
At the same time, besides reaching out some leaders of successful FOSS projects, I don’t think that FOSS lawyers are an easy task to find but maybe?
I would tend to disagree on this one by saying that this sounds like a “Yacht problem”. It’s like asking where to put my millions of $ because my wallet cannot fit them. Get the millions first, then you can figure out how to fix it.
Same here, get a successful project first and then you can accomodate/branch/edit if needed. You can always start safe with Apache/GPL if you plan on making a product out of it.
FOSS ecosystem is based on street-cred, so people will follow if they light you approach/ideas, the LICENSE is just for some issues with lawyers/companies if you get into their way by doing something good so that it’s dangerous to them.
I tried to make an account there but they blocked my because of Tor usage
I have read that some people send questions directly to the FSF or Richard Stallman if they can’t find an answer, but I want to make sure I searched everywhere before annoying them.
Imagine someone builds a very cool project but then someone who has contributed fundamental code sues because of licensing issues and they would need to rewrite half of the code base.
Open Source Licenses are the foundation of the entire ecosystem, not just for lawyers/companies
Oh yeah, they are very hostile on that especially recently.
Don’t expect a lot of cooperation with any of the big names if you hide yourself behind Tor.
Not sure if those people do have the time/interest to reply to “common” people.
But I would be very happy if I’m wrong here.
Very unlikely. I mean, I don’t see any of those situations to happen:
who would give a groundbreaking contribution to a project yet flip on it? (assuming this would happen to begin with, which is very unlikely)
that potential contributor can also have some street-cred that you can check before merging
you are always free to rewrite their code, LLMs are quite good at that
Speaking of which, it’s very much the Far West regarding licences/ownership as of lately.
So, I wouldn’t consider any kind of code as Intellectual property anymore because nobody cares and just scraps the hell out of everyone without giving any contribution back.
I also don’t see anybody caring or asking you for money based on code alone in 2026 (and beyond).
Code is not what matters nowadays anyway, it’s very dispensable and just a tool. Businesses succeed thanks to totally different vectors, it’s not about fancy meta-programming abstractions or whatever is the thing maintainers might be proud of: it does not matter.
Any half-sized company that is “successful” nowadays, doesn’t ship anything specific regarding their code. That one is long gone and probably will never come back (at least, from my Web-experience might be different in other topics like embedded/robotics maybe? ).
I have quite a few starred projects on my Github, I never really cared if their license is MIT/Apache/whatever if you ask me and I think that I’m not an isolated case.
Webdevs that I know/worked with, never gave a single damn about licenses. They want to have a cool tool solve a problem and this is just the kind of detail that get’s in the way of creating something fun, hence most people do not include a licence at all or maybe just some MIT.
Honestly, I don’t see how it matters in real world.
But maybe you’re planning to code something ground-breaking on an unexplored and virgin topic? I guess I got exposed to too much basic tools that is dispensable/replaceable anytime.
Hence, feel free to tell us more about your idea because it might change the discussion quite a lot.
It’s so unfortunate because the Open Source Stack Exchange probably has the best quality answers among active forums, but it’s proprietary and hostile to private accounts which really defeats its purpose if you ask me. I wanted an alternative myself so here were my findings:
Codidact is an open source Stack Exchange alternative, but questions about licensing under their software section are apparently off-topic. I wonder if anyone proposed allowing it under certain tags or creating an alternative to the Open Source Stack Exchange within their Proposals or Meta sites. If not then maybe someone should.
r/freesoftware and r/opensource are fairly popular and while they have many of the same issues as Stack Exchange, it’s a bit easier to create a pseudonymous account on Reddit in my experience.
The people behind StackExchange never truly cared about making something nice out of their platform. Now that all the AI companies scrapped the hell out of their public resources, it’s tumbleweed time and it is well deserved.
Was a good place but also centralized and with quite an awful UX. Hopefully people move into some decentralized approach or just go back to self-hosting their own blog.
).