Simon Willison’s Weblog

What is the best license for a web framework (ex: Cake, Rails, Django): GPL, BSD, MIT, other? Why?

18th December 2010

My answer to What is the best license for a web framework (ex: Cake, Rails, Django): GPL, BSD, MIT, other? Why? on Quora

Not the GPL. The share-alike viral clause will prevent anyone from creating closed source proprietary projects on top of the framework.

Posted 18th December 2010 at 6:29 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Locating the source of a mysterious beep with Claude - 9th November 2026
Hide your slop PR descriptions behind <details><summary> - 9th November 2026
Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too - 3rd November 2026
The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence” - 2nd November 2026

This is What is the best license for a web framework (ex: Cake, Rails, Django): GPL, BSD, MIT, other? Why? by Simon Willison, posted on 18th December 2010.

frameworks 29 web-frameworks 28 quora 1,005

Next: What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet?

Previous: What are the best alternatives to JavaScript when writing web applications?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe