Events

Prof. Kim Sau CHUNG
Professor of Economics
Hong Kong Baptist University

Open source licenses are noted for being self-referential. The two most popular licenses are GPL and BSD. GPL says the next developer cannot go proprietary, and can only go open source with the same license, namely GPL. BSD says the next developer can go proprietary, and can also go open source with any license, including BSD. We provide a framework to study all selfreferential licenses. When developers discount the future exponentially, and when forking is unlikely, there is no need to consider any self-referential licenses other than GPL and BSD. With hyperbolic discounting, or if forking is likely, there are other simple self-referential licenses that can do better than GPL and BSD.