Discussion: License

[adrybakov]

It appears that the consensus is to make the format open-source. Which open-source license should be used?

[mducle]

I would prefer a permissive license like the BSD 3-clause or MIT license, because there is no restriction on how the software can be used except to acknowledge the authors and I think that this will increase the likelihood of adoption. Furthermore, many popular formats use these permissive licenses (e.g. JSON uses a modified MIT license and Markdown was released under the BSD 3-clause license).

Alternatively, if people prefer some form of copyleft protection, then I think that the LGPL is more appropriate than the full GPL as it does not enforce that programs which just use the format without modification need be open source.