[S5-discuss] License status?

[David Goodger]

On 11/13/06, ryan king <ryan at theryanking.com> wrote:
> I'll have to talk to Eric about the licensing issues. I don't want to
> create a burden on anyone wanting to contribute, but I still want to
> be able to provide the best application possible.

That's fair. But a license doesn't put a burden on contributors,
except that they should agree to include their contributions under the
same license. Licenses do put a "burden" on users and redistributors.
FOSS (Free & Open Source software) licenses typically place no burden
on users, but redistribution requires following the rules.

Copyright says "X is mine, and you can't use or copy it".
A license modifies that and says "you may use X, and copy X under
these conditions".
A public domain dedication says "I give up all rights to X".

> I'm not a lawyer

Nor am I, and nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice.

> and I'm not even that well versed for a open source
> developer– the complexity of which license works with which is
> overwhelming to me.

If you're taking on the role of an open source software project lead,
you need to educate yourself.

> Is there anyone around who knows more about our options? What are the
> disadvantages of staying Public Domain?

If you want to stay strictly, 100% public domain (PD), you can't
include anything that isn't PD. S5 can mix in other things, but then
it is no longer 100% PD (parts are, parts aren't). Most of Docutils is
PD, but there are exceptions. There's nothing wrong with that, but the
situation has to be made very clear. See
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/COPYING.html for an example.

PD means that nobody asserts copyright on S5. That, in turn, means
that anybody can take the S5 code and do absolutely whatever they want
with it: sell it, rename it, put their name on it as author, even
assert copyright on it. It wouldn't do much good for somebody to
assert copyright on something that was PD, because anybody else could
just take the PD original and ignore the copyrighted version. But
anybody could take S5, modify it, and slap their own copyright &
license on the modified project, and we wouldn't be able to take their
changes and put them back into S5. Or somebody could take S5 and
incorporate it into their own closed-source project.

Some people don't "believe" in the public domain. Copyright is
automatic, and these people don't believe it's even *possible* to
disclaim copyright. I just use the PD dedication text from the
Creative Commons, which is crystal clear:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain

PD doesn't provide you with warranty and liability disclaimers like
most licenses do. That doesn't bother me, but it might worry some.

In the case of Docutils, I chose public domain for two reasons: I
didn't want the headache of choosing a license, and I wanted users to
have the ability to do anything at all with the code. In hindsight,
there's just as much headache with PD, and the MIT license allows
plenty of freedom to users.

The S5 Project should decide what rights to grant and to reserve.

> What other licenses provide us the ability to include libraries like MochiKit?

You already have the ability to distribute MochiKit, since its license
allows redistribution; you just can't call it PD. MochiKit's copyright
is held by Bob Ippolito, and only he can set its license. You have to
include his copyright and license notice in the copy you distribute.
And including MochiKit doesn't force the rest of S5 to use the same
license.

I was just looking for clarification on the requirements, that's all :-)

-- 
David Goodger <http://python.net/~goodger>