Finalize the open source software licence for OSO

[himalayajung]

Finalize on the most pertinent open source software licence for Open Science Organization (OSO)

Possible references

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license
2. https://opensource.org/licenses

[abinashk]

I went through some of the commonly used licenses. Our answers to the following questions will determine which license works best for us:

1. Do we expect to patent any of our works?
2. Do we expect people to create derivatives of our works?

[KeithSSmith]

A good resources to help with this decision:

• https://choosealicense.com/

When I browse through other projects it seems like the general rule of thumb is anything that is code to test or interact with the network (JavaScript, Java, Python wrappers) it is under a simple MIT license. Anything that is a wallet, token, algorithm, etc. it is either GPL 3.0 or Apache 2.0 and there are a couple of projects with Eclipse and/or Mozilla licenses. Somewhat surprisingly Bitcoin (and subsequently Litecoin) are under the simple MIT license.

To answer @abinashk :

1. I like the idea of Patentleft to allow anyone to improve on anything we do. Obviously it would be great to include new or better ideas as part of the project but that will not necessarily be a decision for us to make.

2. I can't say I expect people to create derivatives of our work but certainly working/collaborating on the platform and integrating it with other platforms will be big as we grow.

[himalayajung]

Three things.

1. I would prefer the licenses to be as liberal as possible
2. Since OSO will have several different components, it will be better to have different licenses for them
3. Finalizing the license might not be as time sensitive as we anticipated. It seems even Ethereum has not finalized the licenses for its software components yet; see here https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Licensing