Re: [pollen] Licensing for Pollen projects

[Matthew Butterick]

> On Dec 7, 2017, at 3:26 PM, Joel Dueck  wrote:
> 
> For any serious work, though, I am wondering how this approach would really 
> shake out. When “the book is a program”, is it ever a) useful or b) legally 
> meaningful to license the prose and the code separately when they are 
> interwoven and distributed together?


I can't give anyone legal advice. For myself it's a question of how can I make 
the material useful to its intended audience. Code becomes more valuable when 
it can be copied and futzed with in a compiler. Whereas ordinary prose can 
already be futzed with in the mind. So IMO a permissive license has less 
incremental benefit.

I did a similar split-license idea with the pollen-tfl sample project. Some is 
open source and some not. [1] Nothing bad has happened. I considered enforcing 
this more strictly by splitting the open-source material into a 
`pollen-tfl-lib` package that was held in a public repo, and then a separate 
private repo with the other stuff. But that seemed complicated. It's partly a 
Pollen recruiting tool. So it should be as easy & complete as possible. 

OTOH I haven't released the Pollen source code for Beautiful Racket. I don't 
think it has much explanatory value beyond the Pollen docs & pollen-tfl. Plus, 
there's always work to make source code clean enough to be worth sharing.

Earlier in my career I was surrounded by piracy-obsessed sasquatches. Later, by 
free-culture zealots. Ultimately I think both miss the point. The only way to 
completely protect work is to not release it. At which point the revenue 
potential is $0. OTOH if you make everything free, the potential also goes to 
$0. Therefore, somewhere in between is the optimal level of freedom (or piracy 
if you prefer).  


[1] https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen-tfl 


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[pollen] Licensing for Pollen projects

[Joel Dueck]

In the Pollen projects I've released so far, I've tried to make the 
licensing for the code pretty permissive (= more useful for other 
Pollen-curious folks), but to assert slightly more control over the writing 
itself.

(For example 
)

If you ask me why I did this, the answer in these trivial cases so far is 
“it made sense at the time.”

For any serious work, though, I am wondering how this approach would really 
shake out. When “the book is a program”, is it ever a) useful or b) legally 
meaningful to license the prose and the code separately when they are 
interwoven and distributed together?

In the absence of actual precedents, I don't know that I'm expecting anyone 
to have a definitive answer. And it won’t materially affect me unless I 
ever get to the point of paying a lawyer to try and enforce a copyright 
claim. 

But it seems like something worth discussing if people are going to make *and 
distribute* Pollen projects.

It's also possible that most serious Pollen projects would not distribute 
source code at all.

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