rails-template
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ackama
Are we using the correct license?
We created this template because we want to share our approach with our community. It's also a useful exercise to allow us to do some development in the open and practise our communication and feedback skills.
The MIT license which this project is currently licensed under permits any use - including closed-source modification and distribution. Since we are sharing our base project with the wider community, I wonder if a more idealistic option would be GPLv3. This still allows for others to use and modify the template, however they must release their changes back into the open-source community.
I believe this is an important question to ask as we begin to start splitting parts of the template out into their own projects, since we probably would like to use the same license across all of the variants as well as core.
This also ties into the other templates we are preparing.
If I understand correctly (and I might be completely wrong) GPL kind of forces all projects based upon it to be open sourced which may conflict, or require special treatment, with potential IP related to our client's work? We'd still may just go and change the license when needed to, as it's Ackama's copyright.
No answers just more questions :D
@halles I think that comes down to how each template works. In the case of the rails template, it's not something we copy-paste to start a project - we generate completely fresh code each time. In this case, I think that it would be acceptable to license this repository under GPL. By doing this, we would be saying that we would require any forkers that extend our template to also open source their changes, however I think that projects generated using the template could be licensed however they need to be.
I should say this is a bit of a bikeshed discussion, since MIT is fine - I am just proud of how much we've invested into this project in the public domain, and would like to see those who make downstream changes do the same.
@joshmcarthur it's the same for the php templates. We are on the same page 👍
My $0.02 is that MIT is fine. Rails is MIT and I think we want anywhere that can use Rails to be able to use this code too. Changing to GPL could mean some teams can't use it because of corporate policies.
After some in-person discussion about this, @joshmcarthur and I have concluded that MIT is probably the right choice for this repo. Feel free to re-open this if you have a compelling case for another choice.