MICRO/THEORY: Designing Open Source Licenses; Professor Kim Sau-Chung (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Abstract

Open source licenses are noted for being self-referential. The two most popular licenses are GPL and BSD. GPL says the next developer cannot go proprietary, and can only go open source with the same license, namely GPL. BSD says the next developer can go proprietary, and can also go open source with any license, including BSD. We provide a framework to study all self-referential licenses, including but not limited to GPL and BSD. We provide an explanation of why GPL and BSD stood out from all self-referential licenses as being the most popular among open source developers. We also present settings where there are other self-referential licenses better than GPL and BSD.

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