Choosing a license for a software specification
We are writing a specification for a programming language and we'd like to pick a license for the specs (not the compiler). There are two major goals we want to achieve:
* The specs should stay free forever
* It should be impossible for anyone to close off the sources to the specification
This almost yells GPL, but since we are targeting a platform where there is a huge potential for languages to interop, we don't want such an invasive license. If another compiler team wants to do anything related to something they have to read our specs for, they are technically doing derivative work, which forces GPL on them, which we'd like to avoid. While it's desirable to enforce same license when forking the specs itself, this case is wildly different and we wouldn't like to enforce that.
What would be the recommendations for our situation?
* The specs should stay free forever
* It should be impossible for anyone to close off the sources to the specification
This almost yells GPL, but since we are targeting a platform where there is a huge potential for languages to interop, we don't want such an invasive license. If another compiler team wants to do anything related to something they have to read our specs for, they are technically doing derivative work, which forces GPL on them, which we'd like to avoid. While it's desirable to enforce same license when forking the specs itself, this case is wildly different and we wouldn't like to enforce that.
What would be the recommendations for our situation?
