I’ve been pondering open-source licenses lately, and something I’m having a hard time grasping:
What’s stopping bad guys from taking, say, libGDX (which is under an Apache 2.0 license), rebranding it, and marketing as their own?
I suppose the answer is “the community would come after them with pitchforks”, but what about smaller open-source projects without a community?
The reason I ask this is I’m in the process of open-sourcing an entire website (tutorials, game uploader, comment system, etc) and inviting my users to make changes to it, learn how to build their own JavaEE/Spring applications, etc. I’ve put a lot of time into this, and it scares me to think that somebody might just take it all, copy their logo into it, and spend their time on marketing instead of programming.
Sure, that’s an imaginary scenario and the answer to most of these types of questions is “you aren’t popular enough to worry about this kind of stuff”, but it seems that open source licensing would deal with this exact kind of thing… I’m just not sure how.
I’ve been using a Creative Commons No-Derivatives license for my open-source games, which meant that people could learn from the code but couldn’t just take the code and create a direct derivative from it. Through my recent research I’ve learned that Creative Commons is actually not supposed to be used for software, and the No-Derivatives isn’t exactly right for the website anyway since I’ll be hosting it on GitHub and allowing (encouraging) forks.
I suppose something like a copyleft license might help, as at the very least I could then use any changes that people make (since they’ll be required to release their code under the same copyleft license), but then again who enforces that? And that doesn’t apply to non-code changes, like the above scenario of basic rebranding.
So, what open-source licenses do you guys and gals use for your projects? Is it really an all-or-nothing case where open-sourcing means letting people do whatever they want with your work?