Markdown licensing

[John Gruber]

Stephen Haberman <stephenh at chase3000.com> wrote on 12/13/04 at 2:15pm:

> I assumed just the opposite. E.g. that even calling the shell to invoke Perl
> would be "linking" and hence make my distribution of Markdown.pl in a
> commercial app be in violation of the GPL. Again, just my naïve assumption.
> I'm glad that is not the case.

Well, perhaps in spirit, it *is* linking. And one of the reasons I
chose the GPL in the first place, a year ago, was that I was holding
out hope that companies who wanted to use Markdown in commercial
software would pay me something to license it under something other
than the GPL. I didn't think they *had* to, however -- it was just
something I thought there might be a market for.

Ideally, earning some money from Markdown -- or getting paid for
Markdown's further development -- would still be nice, but there
doesn't seem to be any market for it.

Overall, I'm just happy to see it being used.

What I'd like is for any open source project to be able to include
Markdown in its distribution. I can see why BSD-licensed projects
feel they can't do that while Markdown is licensed under the GPL,
especially under PHP.

If I switch to the LGPL, I'm fairly certain any open source project
should be able to include Markdown, so long as they either don't
change Markdown's source code, or, if they do, they release those
changes under the LGPL. But I wonder if BSD-licensed projects will
still feel they can't use it?

For example LGPL'd code can't be used with Apache projects:

  <http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/Using_20LGPL_27d_20code>

The difference between switching to a BSD-style license instead of
switching to the LGPL is that under the BSD, someone would be able
to take Markdown and create and release a proprietary version of it
without releasing the source. I'd rather not see this happen, but I
don't think it'd be a big deal if it. For one thing, they wouldn't
be allowed to call their derived version "Markdown" without my
permission. It's the source code the BSD license grants use of, not
the name.

The difference between a BSD license and a Perl-ish dual
GPL-Artistic license is that the BSD is not ambiguous; the Artistic
license is.

Thus, in a nut, why I'm leaning toward BSD.

-J.G.