Why ruby license?

[Johan Gustav]

All these different licenses makes me confused. As I been understand it
you may choose a GPL license or Ruby's own license. The GPL license is
not compatible with, for example, the MTT license which Rail is released
with, and I do not want to use the GPL license for my project either.

My questions is:

1. Why has Ruby its own license and are not licensed under something
like the Apache license?

2. Why is Ruby not dual license with the Apache license, rather then the
GPL? which I understand is more closer to the ruby license and not as
restrictive as the GPL license?

Sorry for my poor English

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

1. Why =C2=A0has Ruby =C2=A0its own license and are not licensed under so= mething
like the Apache license?

I hate to answer so flippantly, but, because.

It's the same reason that we have BSD and MIT licenses. At the heart
of them, they are almost the same (nobody kill me for generalizing
but they feel different, have a different flavor to them.

It's a matter more of tastes than anything else. Is it to you're
liking that your name is always attached, that people can easily use
it along side commercial or non commercial code, do you want to make
it easy or difficult to be bundled?

Unless you're really sure of the future of your project, it doesn't
really matter. Pretty much all of the "open source" licenses are
compatible at some level. You can move a project from one license to
another, even to a proprietary one. Which license depends on how hard
it is, but I think it's always possible.

This page may help you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licences

--Kyle