Deciding on a license for the Loomio app

Some relevant info from an email I received from Strype last week:

I generally recommend the AGPL for server-side packages.

I also recommend signing up to the Franklin St Statement:
http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/

...and the EFF Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/bill-privacy-rights-social-network-users

I would suggest stating and linking to the license you've chosen (and those statements) on both loom.io and loomio.org.

BTW As the copyright holder you can change license at any time, but any code released under the previous license can still be used under the terms of the older license. This is what happened when Oracle bought OpenOffice and attempted to turn it into a proprietary product. The Document Foundation was formed to develop a fork of the code as it existed at the time of Oracle's purchase, resulting in LIbreOffice, which has been so successful that Oracle threw in the towel and handed OO over to the Apache Foundation:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project/

My ideal would be something like "Anyone can use the Loomio code, which is free and open source, as long as what they're doing with it is also free and open source"... does this work that way?

The MIT license is simple, solid, and does everything that it says on the box. The only question is, do you want code from Loomio to be used in someone else's commercial application? If you don't, then the MIT license does not protect you from that. It requires you to distribute the MIT license with any version of the loomio codebase, but I think the think to consider is, what if Loomio is used as an open source component of a closed source app? The general reason the rails community likes that is they tend to think that's ok.

However, I'd be quite happy if you were to use some sort of GPL variant (such as the AGPL). I would quite like to see Loomio enginified, and if so I'd probably install the engine into the Atamai website. That website is currently under the MIT license, but it wouldn't be hard to change it to AGPL.

Alanna, what you're suggesting is what the AGPL license is designed for.

@Craig moving Atamai over to AGPL might not be difficult for you, but I can imagine many sites that might want to stick with their MIT license and still use Loomio inside of it. If we license Loomio with AGPL, other sites licensed under MIT wouldn't be able to use Loomio inside their app, correct?

@Richard - it sounds like what Strypey is saying is that it wouldn't be hard to move from AGPL back down to MIT if we wanted to. In which case we could play it safe and start out with AGPL.

My gut is still telling me that at this point there is not much risk of a for-profit company coming and taking our code and then making something better with it. Or at least, if they wanted to do that and had the resources to do so, restricting their access to our codebase probably wouldn't stop them.

This one also looks interesting! Not that I really know about this stuff... http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License: "The peer production license is an example of the Copyfarleft type of license, in which only other commoners, cooperatives and nonprofits can share and re-use the material, but not commercial entities intent on making profit through the commons without explicit reciprocity"

Right... just realized that's the same one Rich mentioned