Gentle persons: I've spent every waking moment of the last two weeks by my wife's side after a massive infection put her into septic shock. Those of you who know me know this isn't a play for sympathy (and please, please, please, let's not fill this channel with responses to the news) but an explanation for why I've been uncharacteristically silent during this lively discussion of copyright and licensing. Some may recall I tried unsuccessfully to start such a discussion twice, first in January 2012, and then again in August 2012. I think I failed because I was coming from the perspective of an editor (gack) rather than an implementer (yay).
----- (aside) In response to various messages about what the different licenses mean and what the legal ramifications are, I have recently discovered that O'Reilly*, as part of its Open Book Project, has made freely available the book "Open Source and Free Software Licensing" by Andrew M. St. Laurent, August 2004. One can download the individual chapters as pdf files from http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html The chapters are: Chapter 1: Open Source Licensing, Contract, and Copyright Law Chapter 2: The MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses Chapter 3: The GPL, LGPL, and Mozilla Licenses Chapter 4: Qt, Artistic, and Creative Commons Licenses Chapter 5: Non-Open Source Licenses Chapter 6: Legal Impacts of Open Source and Free Software Licensing Chapter 7: Software Development Using Open Source and Free Software Licenses Note well Chapters 1, 6 & 7 which get beyond textual analysis of the individual licenses. I haven't read it all yet but the parts I have were easy to read and very good. It may not be as good as having an intellectual-property rights lawyer in your pocket but it's as close as I can get for free. ----- Back to my implementation theme. The recent comment about getting LCNC included in major distributions brings this one home for me. I don't have a dog in the fight over choosing licenses, but I think we should do a better job than before in our implementation of the choice(s) we make. 1) There are hundreds of source-code files in the LCNC distribution. I won't repeat my year-old messages about the disparities in the style and content of their copyright and licensing statements. I know I sound like that school teacher you most detested but it seems to me an important step is to impose a common style. Of course, the content may differ depending on the source of the code but the provenance, copyright, and licensing should be as clear as we can make it. This seems especially important if we contemplate making the lower layers of LCNC visible in their own right. I looked at samples from the Linux kernel and found they vary more than I expected. I suppose this reflects its decades of code development starting with the archetypal Thunderdome developer, Mr. "Rules? There are no rules" Linus Torvalds. Some files had surprisingly minimal statements, but they all have a statement. I looked at samples from GNU software and, unsurprisingly, found them more uniformly documented. I don't want to emulate Richard Stallman but I do think we would benefit from more uniformity. 2) I've momentarily lost it, but there was an interesting CONTRIBUTING file alongside the usual COPYING file in somebody's project which spells out the expectation/obligation of contributors to abide by the overarching licensing statement of the project. I think inclusion of such a file could only help the LCNC project. I'll try to find it again. 3) I think the documentation should prominently display a statement of the software copyright and licensing statement (and philosophy) up front. A recent email exchange on our lists was an example of the confusion created by having only the documentation copyright and licensing statement plainly visible. Try searching either the wiki or the website on "licensing." The resulting hits are mostly about documentation. There is the ambiguous statement "GPL licensing terms have been applied to the derived code" which appears in discussion of how LCNC/EMC2 differ from the NIST code. I know the history of the development of LCNC. I don't want to rehash why things are the way they are now. I just want to see them get better as we move forward. Regards, Kent *I still think O'Reilly is villainous in its treatment of authors (see, e.g., recent hacker news traffic), but this Open Book is genuinely useful. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_mar _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
