I have found an article with links to compare license types, but as there are so many, it's still very hard to decide, so I will have to keep reading, but what I hope to find are answers to the following:
- which license is the broadest scope of application and most permissive, such that I can develop many things as individual and stand alone components of a greater whole vision combining these elements, without having to look at multiple license types to suit individual components, and possibly needing a different license type between the components and the whole?
- having found this license type, is it possible to convert one license type to another, so that any starting points available through other people's projects, can be converted to this common license type, and thus take advantage of that coding shortcut, without sacrificing the simplicity and freedom all these components require to help them go ahead?
Further information:
the code I want to develop is itself not a product for sale, and while I would want at some stage to release that code, in the short term, I need to keep it private only to a trusted development team, so that other people's vested interests do not sabotage or undermine in any way the objectives I am pursuing
the purpose of all the components is to construct stand alone elements of a whole integrated system, meaning that each provides a function relevant to the whole, but its individual function is also something of purpose even without that whole
the reason for the privacy and security concerns is because this is the result of a 30 year academic obsession of mine with the quantification of ecological and social justice and sustainability via the principles of ecological systems modelling and thermodynamics, as a basis for non-species-biased, non-property/trade/currency-based, and non-hierarchical ( anarchic ) justice economics and politics ... so there's a huge amount of work at stake already, even before any coding begins, and the objectives and principles of the whole vision are for the betterment of the world, and so I do not trust this project to just be completely open source from day one, as we live in a world full of people with vested interests who would sabotage and undermine ( both intentionally and unintentionally ) anything which is either perceived as a threat to their interests ( whether it's actually a threat or not ), or where they see advantage in redirecting a project towards their own ends ( and they're foolish enough to think they can second guess 30 years of obsession in a matter of minutes or hours without any comprehension of the reasons for any decisions made )
so I am looking for a means to short cut development time, by way of using existing code, without being restricted to a licensing choice being made by others from that existing code, and without being required by any licensing choice to have to expose this code to the open source community as a whole, until it is developed enough to the point of being able to protect itself from interference
Alternative Question:
- if what I am seeking as a solution to my dilemma is not possible within the way the licenses work, is there some other way of achieving this goal, or will I be forced to code everything from scratch?