Decision on final public license for repo

[ChristopherA]

This repo was initialized with a MIT License (spdx:MIT) as this is the Permissive License used by the bitcoin-core community (see [COPYING], and basically the purpose of this project is to standup full nodes using bitcoind.

We clearly do not want to use a copyleft license with this project, however, there is an argument that in general Blockchain Commons as it's choice for permissive licenses should use the BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License (spdx:BSD-2-Clause-Patent) as it adds an express patent grant and is an OSI-Approved license.

However, the Apache Foundation has listed this license as one of the Category X license, meaning it can't be used in Apache products. I'm don't completely understand the issue, but I've found some discussion at Lesson learned from facebook and BSD+Patent, but Facebook describes it differently.

On the good side, Blue Oak Council lists this license is a Gold, their 2nd highest rating.

The "Category X" problem may also challenge us if we choose the Apache 2.0 license for our standard Weak Copy Left license.

This whole area annoys me and I wish we could avoid it, but with the proliferation of submarine blockchain patents, we will need to create some policies here.

-- Christopher Allen

[ChristopherA]

Recent commentary @kemitchell on this topic:

https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/07/BSD-Patents.html

[ChristopherA]

Summary: That BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License (spdx:BSD-2-Clause-Patent) is not the same license as the proposed Facebook BSD+Patent. The BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License (spdx:BSD-2-Clause-Patent) is “gold”.

[maaku]

Why not the MPL? It is a BSD-compatible copyleft license.

[ChristopherA]

We likely will choose one Permissive and one Copyleft.

For Permissive the BSD-2-Clause-Patent a good one for works derivative of BSD or MIT code, or one mostly of libraries that are BSD or MIT.

Lots of discussion among Patrons of the choice of our default Copyleft license. I’m leaning to Apache 2.0.

— Christopher Allen

[maaku]

What do you mean by choose one of each? Dual licensing, or different licensing based on the project?

[ChristopherA]

A number of our Patrons don’t want to financially support Copyleft, and much of Bitcoin is Permissive, so some repositories will need to be Permissive as well. It is a mostly a pragmatic choice but the addition of some patent terms moves us down the right road.

However, longer term as we hopefully have more control over our code repositories, we need to choose a Copyleft.

— Christopher Allen