Licensing advise requested ;)

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I am sorry if this opens nearly healed wounds :wink: I searched for advice on how to license themes and theme components for Hugo. The consensus seems to be that whatever licence is used, it should be one that makes it free and reusable.

I am not that versed in open source, but I know that for instance, ā€œour friend WordPressā€ ā„¢ requires (?) themes and plugins to be of the same license as WordPress itself, making it quite easy to mix core with plugins and themes.

For me, that would mean I license everything I consider open source under the Apache 2.0 license. My proprietary themes for paying customers always have a nice non-license added.

Is that ok or overkill? And why not adopt a ā€œregimenā€ similar to WP that forces or asks for using the same license as Hugo itself?

Edit: Is the Apache license appropriate for themes/components?

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I wanna say I read somewhere that the MIT license is recommended for themes, but I cannot find where I read that. Iā€™ll post a link here if I can dig it up.

Update: the example theme.toml from the hugoThemes repo has this line:

license = "MIT"

So I take that as a hint.

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WordPress is a bit different because of the way PHP and themes are used, and the nature of the GPL. Practically, I think MIT or Apache is fine for themes. I use CC0, which is dope, because I can license my content and my theme all in one. :slight_smile:

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Hereā€™s a good overview with explanations:

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Hiya anon user! I am personally interested in this. I make my monies from WordPress, long time contributor and member and blah blah blah, Iā€™ve been active in licensing discussions around that very issue.

Iā€™m super interested to discuss this where the crux of the conversation is to discover how that actual plays out. Iā€™m preambling this because so often (as attested by Patrickā€™s initial sentence) licensing discussions get heated, and Iā€™m not looking for that.

And on a personal note, Iā€™m a fan of both copyleft licenses that ā€œinfectā€ sharing, but default to CC0/public dedication for, like, everything. But that I even think of this stuff means I like if when we all have the same understanding and, ahem, verisimilitude. :slight_smile:

Okay, with that out of the way, why do you think it is the same as the GPL/WordPress themes? I thought it was particular to how the GPL worked in regards to calling libraries and precedents set before it (this is from memory, I will visit the link you posted to catch up, but Iā€™m apparently confident enough to move forward!). I didnā€™t think the APL had the copyleftist qualities that created the WP environment. Like the MIT license.

Is that not the case? Letā€™s discuss!