There is the 'Additional Grant for Open-Source Projects' section that seems to permit inclusion in open source project. Do you mind explaining why you think this is not enough? I'm not an expert in licenses so genuinely interested in your take.
Let's say I have an open-source project licensed under Apache 2. The grant allows me to include the extension in my project. But it doesn't allow me to relicense it under Apache 2 or any other compatible license. So if I include it, my project can't be Apache 2-licensed anymore.
Apache 2 is just an example here - the same would apply for practically any open source license.
The one place I imagine it could still work is if the open-source project, say a sqlite browser, includes it as an optional plugin. So the project itself stays open-source, but the grant allows using the proprietary plugin with it.
I don't see why this would infect your project, though. You aren't using the code directly, you're using it as a tool dependency, no? Same way as if your OSS project used an Oracle DB to store data.
The reason I choose to apply open source licenses to my project as I want other people to be able to use them without any limitations (beyond those set out in the open source license I selected, which are extremely permissive.)
If they depend on software that carries limitations, I can no longer make that promise to my own users.
Or does their extra license term mean I can ship my own project which is the thinnest possible wrapper around theirs but makes it fully open source? That seems unlikely.
I used to think this, but now I feel like anything I write will just be vacuumed up by bots and no human will ever even know about it, unless I include some kind of terms that at least make the work traceable to an artifact.
In this aggregate form, there is little difference between pseudocode snippets in a post like this one, versus a well-maintained library getting scraped.
The more I think about it, I don’t even really crave credit so much as the feedback loop that tells me whether I’m doing anything useful.
I haven’t solved this contradiction, so I still release under the MIT license.
