Confused on what license to choose

Business
1

I have worked with my friend on a project and made a website. This is the website: http://tofsis.com/

It’s more or less like an Educational CMS. Now the thing is, it’s in its initial stage. We still have to prepare more modules for the site as instructed by the college.

So, my partner and I thought of making it open sourced so that people in college can build on it. We want to choose from a pool of eligible developers who are really interested and give the codes only to them under certain conditions so that they can prepare a particular module for the site or fix the existing bugs. And for things like GPA calculator, attendance calculator, you don’t need the codes for the site.

I read completely about licenses and I don’t think we can choose open source license as yet because we are not giving out the codes now. But what about Creative Commons? Just adding a CC badge like SO.

I see that on SO footer there is a CC stamp. SO is not open sourced to my knowledge. But I also heard CC is not meant for softwares or codes. So when does a developer use CC license? And is it fair in my case to use a GPL without giving out the code now but put some more additional custom conditions?

What should I do in my case? I want to put up a license. I don’t want anyone to commercialise and I want people to share back things too.

Thank You

2

Hi,

no you can’t attach these restrictions to the GPL, but there are plenty of licences to choose from on http://opensource.org/licenses/category

For example this one requires you to contribute changes back http://opensource.org/licenses/RPL-1.5 and I know there is at least one that disallows commercialisation down the line (may be apache or PHP licence)

CC is for text, images and other things that are not software, doesn’t apply to what you do. Alternatively why don’t you just have a licence written by an attorney or bundle it with a reseller/ partner or whatever agreement.

I must add however that I don’t see why I would be interested as a developer if you put all these conditions on it. Anyone that is good can simply build a product like yours himself for their purposes, so I would need to see where the win-win(-win) is here?

HTH, Jochen