Hello, I work on Pharo, an open source derivative of Smalltalk. Pharo is licensed under MIT hence most of my work needs to be licensed also under MIT.

However, time to time I have some projects in my free time that I made for my personal usage or for friends, and in those cases I am not OK with my work being used by for-profit project not giving anything back. I would very much prefer to use GPLv3 on those cases, but my understanding of licensing is very poor and I have been told there is a “virus” behavior on GPLv3 that may prevent people to use at all what I do, and that’s not my intention.

Do you have any advice how to handle this?

  • estebanlm@lemmy.mlOP
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    this is the “virus” thing explained (by chatgpt, heh, but this is exactly what I heard) : Inheritance and Derivative Works: In object-oriented programming, inheritance allows you to create new classes based on existing classes, inheriting their attributes and behaviors. When using GPL-licensed code, whether GPLv3 or LGPLv3, any derived classes or subclasses created within your project will be considered derivative works. As a result, if you choose to distribute or publicly release these derivative works, they must comply with the licensing terms of the original GPL-licensed code.

    • duncesplayed@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s not really a good explanation. The concept of a “derivative work” in copyright law is unrelated to object-oriented technology, and the GPL is mainly applied to non-OO code anyway.