You know, it's painful to even follow this discussion. Reading of one's hard work as being described as viral... Yes, I'm sure that's what I had in mind 2+ years ago.
Let's go back a ways.... bbkeys is written on top of the extremely well-done code-base of the bbtools, written quite thanklessly by John Kennis. You know, bbpager, bbapm, bb*. They all started with John. And John deserves MUCH praise and thanks that I doubt he gets. Now, all of the bbtools use base classes from blackbox itself, and if you'll peruse through the code of bbpager, say, you'll note that the licensing throughout is as follows.... Anything that's coming from blackbox has the "noble" (God, that's an annoying adjective for something that is most of the time an afterthought when writing code in the hope that other people will find it useful) BSD-style license. Anything that John Kennis wrote is written under the GPL-2 license. Along comes bbkeys, based on bbtools. For starters, I believe it's appropriate that bbkeys carries forward the license of the code that it's based on, namely Kennis's bbtools. Let's call that reason 1 for the GPL "viral" license present in bbkeys. Now, if you'll actually read through the code in bbkeys.cc, you'll note that some parts of the code are derived from the work done in 2 other projects, namely XEmacs and WindowMaker. If you look closely, you'll notice that the original code that was used from those projects was licensed under the GPL-2. And the licensing for those pieces of code are included in bbkeys. We'll call that reason #2 for the GPL "viral" license present in bbkeys. Now, furthermore, and this is what's so very irritating about this entire discussion, other than the above 2 reasons, I gave about 3 seconds of thought to the issue of licensing at all. As I said before, most people who write code out of the goodness of their heart--in the hope that other people will find it useful--are NOT even thinking about what license and copyright they should slap on their code. Honestly. Is this the 8th deadly sin of mankind? Possibly. But really, people who enjoy coding in the attempt to try to help others are in my experience not the same people who love to haggle over copyright law and licensing issues. Furthermore (and I can see your eyes glazing over so I'll cut this short), as far as blackbox and bbkeys playing together... As I said before, I included the GPL-2 licensing with bbkeys because in my very limited knowledge about this sort of thing, it seemed like the Right Thing To Do (TM), based on the above facts. I have no qualm whatsoever about Raven including parts of bbkeys into blackbox proper. Hell, I'd love to see anything kick-start blackbox development again, just-married syndrome or not. If somebody wiser than I about the black arts of copyright issues can advise me on whether or not it's possible/legal/beneficial to replace the GPL-2 "viral" license in bbkeys with something more friendly to the world, so be it. You have my e-mail address. And in closing, bah humbug. On 2001.11.09 18:51 Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Scott Moynes wrote: > <snip> > > On that note, I see that bbkeys is viral GPL'd and our great blackbox is > using the noble BSD-style license. As it is, bbkeys can not (should not) > go back into blackbox. (Which is sad -- because I like bbkeys > functionality, but I prefer it to be part of blackbox.) > > Jeremy C. Reed > ....................................................... > ISP-FAQ.com -- find answers to your questions > http://www.isp-faq.com/ > -- ----%<----------%<---- Jason Kasper (vanRijn) bash$ :(){ :|:&};: Numbers 6:24-26
