Okay, bear with me for a moment, gotta set this up…
I am about to “release” a theme for Hugo. That is in quotes because I am publishing it in a public repo, but I don’t expect anyone to notice as it is a practice run (and also, who am I?).
Hugo comes with a theme quick start when using hugo new theme
, and creates the following tree:
.
├── archetypes
│ └── default.md
├── layouts
│ ├── 404.html
│ ├── _default
│ │ ├── list.html
│ │ └── single.html
│ ├── index.html
│ └── partials
│ ├── footer.html
│ └── header.html
├── LICENSE.md
├── static
│ ├── css
│ └── js
└── theme.toml
Most of those are empty, except for LICENSE.md
, which contains the MIT license text and a theme.toml
skeleton file:
# theme.toml template for a Hugo theme
# See https://github.com/spf13/hugoThemes#themetoml for an example
name = "Name"
license = "MIT"
licenselink = "https://github.com/yourname/yourtheme/blob/master/LICENSE.md"
description = ""
homepage = "http://siteforthistheme.com/"
tags = []
features = []
min_version = "0.20"
[author]
name = ""
homepage = ""
# If porting an existing theme
[original]
name = ""
homepage = ""
repo = ""
Alright, now my questions: given that Hugo is released under the Apache license, and all the Hugo themes I’ve come upon are licensed as MIT, would it be weird to license mine under the GPL? If someone decided to use parts of mine, would they have reason to pause upon seeing the license?
I should say that I understand (as much as a non-paralegal can) the GPL, and I support its use, but I haven’t encountered a project I wanted to contribute to that doesn’t use the GPL (gooooooo WordPress!).
Are there recent examples of this going badly? I am open to balancing principle with getting along with people… to a point.