Re: Guidance on choosing suitable license

[Anonymous Monk]

I would gladly like to share them upfront, but I want to limit the capabilities of the parties that get the code to make them proprietary or closed

That's what "copyleft" family of licenses is about: users are free to use the code in any way they wish to, but if they change it and redistribute, modified source code must also be made available.

while not harming anyone's ability to modify or build upon them to make better code that may or may not be sold or be used commercially

LGPL allows other code that uses your code to retain whatever license it has, even if it's not free software.

You may not want plain GPL for library code because other software that uses it may be the considered derivative work and may be subsequently required to be distributed under GPL. BSD, MIT and similar "permissive" licenses don't have the so-called "viral" property (they don't require dependent code to be distributed under same license), but they also don't require much more that attribution: any modifications to your redistributed code may remain in closed-source form. You may also be interested in the Artistic license (license of Perl itself, BTW): clauses (7) and (8) make is possible to use such code in non-free applications but any modifications to your own code must remain free.

But your choice of LGPL is certainly good for your stated goals.

[hda]

Thanks for your thorough response, AnonymosMonk. Indeed, LGPL suits my needs very well. I will adopt this one.