Create a blog post on the culture of open source software that we can reference in our guidebook (or a new guide page)

[lwasser]

i think that makes a lot of sense to frame it . do you want to make that change to the file? This is also making me think that we should either have a blog post on this topic (probably preferred) OR add a page to the guide about the culture of open source software. Or both. that way we can link to that content rather than adding too much to individual pages. how about that? i can open this as a new issue in this repo and we can decide whether it should be a blog or a page in the guide. and maybe we can get the community to help write it if someone starts it.

i'll open the issue now and we can discuss separately

Originally posted by @lwasser in #189 (comment)

[lwasser]

cc @sneakers-the-rat

[sneakers-the-rat]

Im down to write the copyleft side of this. I feel like we might be biting off more than we can chew making a whole "FOSS Culture" page, but an expanded page on licenses would be a great idea imo

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Copying my comments from slack, hopefully theyre not too out of context:

Yeah I had written it with the goal of making sure we presented it as an alternative. Having the real "when do I use this" guide where a lot of license guides are hedged to death - like if you work at a company or whatever you probably have to use permissive, if you are invested in free software as a social and political movement heres some copyleft guides.

This is one place where I dont feel like potential confusion is worth omission. Omission of copyleft altogether in the name of sensible defaults is a disservice to people who may have no frame of reference for the culture or history of FOSS. Im fine with recommending permissive licenses as "I dont want to think about this rn" default, but I do think we should at least give a plausible nod to it that lets people that would care know that theres something to care about there.

Im down with having separate pages too, I just also think it belongs in main text without being too obtrusive. If ppl on the permissive side could list out the reasons and conditions to use them we could present that alongside the copyleft piece bc ofc there are real reasons for them, that might help with prior concerns about "why would we recommend permissive when copyleft seems good given the proposed text in PR" which is valid

[lwasser]

i like this. i think maybe a longer blog post that talks about the license options could be nice @sneakers-the-rat

i really like what we added to the guide. i also recognize that for a beginner packaging experience, trying to decide between copyleft and permissive will be hard! especially considering the fact that licenses are hard and confusing and a bit scary because they have legal implications.

AND core scientific python packages advocate for permissive .

i also think that many many scientists fall into this space by going down the "make a package route" with very little understanding of the large culture around OSS, it's roots (good and less good) AND the community piece. that is where a blog post would be really nice.

just a thought. this could be posted on our website as a blog with a comment section at the bottom :) i find the open source ecosystem to be fascinating particularly as it intersects with the commercial sector and VC space. there's a lot of inherent conflict!