On 16 Mar 2007, at 10:24, Isaiah Beerbower wrote:
What is Etoile's opinion concerning copyright?
I think we are in favour of it, broadly speaking.
Looking through an SVN checkout I've noticed packages under all
sorts of licenses.
This is true.
I personally prefer the GPL for my app.
In general, I believe, we accept GPL code for applications if there
is no alternative, but prefer more liberal licenses. Libraries
should be LGPL, BSD, MIT or PD at the original author's discretion.
I personally favour BSD, although I think many of the other devs
prefer LGPL. If you are adding code to an existing part of the tree,
please keep your changes no more strictly licensed than the existing
code (e.g. you can add BSD code to an LGPL library, but not GPL'd code).
The GPL has some problems in the long term even for applications,
which may require GPL'd applications to be re-written at a later
date. Since we are aiming to move to a component architecture, and
away from discrete applications, the linking clauses in the GPL are
likely to cause headaches for developers and users[1] in the future.
Please consider this when opting for the GPL.
Should I put the copyright in my name or "The Etoile Project
Developers" or both?
We do not require, or currently have a mechanism for, copyright
assignment. Your code belongs to you.
No doubt there has been discussion concerning this before, so if
someone could point me to a thread in the archives that would be fine.
There was some discussion on Etoile-dev a few weeks ago, and also
some opinions in the interview on GNA.
David
[1] Typically, the GPL doesn't apply to output from a program unless
the output includes components of the program. For example, GCC
embeds some parts of itself in any program it compiles, requiring an
explicit GPL exemption clause. 'Documents' in a future Étoilé system
are likely to be serialised object graphs which can be exchanged with
other users. This means that the users will be passing around
objects, which by definition include the code. This means that the
viral clauses of the GPL can cause it to spread to users' documents,
which is categorically not what we want.
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