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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • If I recall, Enlightenment used to have a rather focal fan base at one time. The DE was a lot prettier than most of its contemporaries, and was relatively lightweight despite having animated effects and everything. I always thought EFL was one of the hidden gems of the Linux ecosystem that was left in GTKs and Qts shadow, but after reading the article (back when it was first published) I realized there was probably a good reason it never got popular. I thought the story was embellished, as thedailywtf articles typically are, with the “SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! Naughty programmer!” stuff, so I downloaded EFL source code and checked. OMG, it was a real error message. (Though I believe it has since been removed.)

    The company in question using EFL was (probably) Samsung, who apparently still uses it as the native graphical toolkit for Tizen.


  • That is a good point to emphasize. A downside of a CLA is that it adds a bit of bureaucracy and may deter some contributors. If the primary concern is whether a GPL licensed app is publishable on an App Store, an alternative is to add an app store exception clause to the license. (The GPL allows optional extra clauses to make the license more permissive.) Though this means that while your code can be incorporated to other GPL licensed applications, you can’t take code from other GPL projects that don’t have the same exception.


  • As others have already said, the prohibition of using the code in commercial applications would make the license not open source/free software (as defined by the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative.)

    These are some of the most commonly used licenses:

    • MIT - a very permissive license. Roughly says “do anything with this as long as you give attribution”
    • BSD - similar to MIT (note that there are multiple versions of the BSD license)
    • ASL2 - another permissive license. Major difference is that it also includes a patent grant clause. (Mini rant: I often hear that GPL3’s patent clause is the reason big companies don’t like it. Yet, ASL2 has the very same clause and it’s Google’s favored license.)
    • GPL - the most popular copyleft license (family). Requires derived works to be licensed under the same terms.
    • LGPL - a variant of the GPL that permits dynamic linking to differently licensed works. Mainly useful for libraries.
    • AGPL - a variant of GPL that specifies that making the software available over a network counts as distribution. (Works around the SaaS loophole. Mainly used for server applications.)
    • Mozilla - a hybrid permissive/copyleft license. I don’t fully understand how this one works.

    If you want to use a true FLOSS license and your goal is to discourage people from selling it, I’d say the GPL is your best bet. Legit vendors who don’t want to give out their source code won’t touch GPL code. The non-legit ones won’t care no matter what license you choose. Also, iOS App Store terms are not compatible with the GPL so they can’t release their stuff there, but you can as long as you hold full copyright to your application.