On Jun 2, 2010, at 9:43, Stephen Eilert <spedr...@gmail.com> wrote: > As I have some code that I would like to contribute back to Chicken, > in the form of eggs, I have started to look into the licensing issue. > I've asked that on #chicken, and the response was that I should choose > my own license.
Good advice. > Sure enough, the eggs page show *a mess*. > BSD: 168 eggs > GPL2: 47 eggs > Public domain: 25 eggs > LGPL2.1: 9 eggs > MIT: 11 eggs > Other: 31 eggs Looks pretty straightforward to me. > This will indubitably generate a flame fest about which license is > best. Certainly. > Some deviation is unavoidable, > specially when eggs bind to external libraries or when they are > ported(hence the XEROX license, for instance). Ideally those should be > an exception and chicken-install (or even chicken itself) should throw > a warning. I thought you *didn't* want to start a flamewar. > As an example of how complicated things are, this is from > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html A good reason to stay out of the business of legislating and policing this stuff. Is this a problem in practice or just in theory? The only qualm I have ever heard is about dynamically linking to GPL (not LGPL) eggs from non-GPL code, otherwise there doesn't seem to be a real issue. That is pretty easy to avoid if you are concerned. > Since eggs are just a chicken-install away, it is non-trivial to > determine the legality of a project that uses several of these. Other than GPL as mentioned, dynamic linking poses very few issues with license compatibility by design, so I am not convinced this is normally a problem. You did have an interesting idea in re license info display. Using the setup api, it should be pretty easy to write a program to display the license for each egg and recursively for its dependencies, since it's in the egg metadata. Do you want a program like this? Jim _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users