[S5-discuss] License status?

[Stefan Rank]

on 13.11.2006 22:05 David Goodger said the following:
> 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.
> 
<snip>
> 
> 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.
> 
<snip>
> 
>> 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 :-)
> 

As I just sent patches, I want to clarify that I do not care about the 
license as long as S5 stays freely available.
I, further, think that including (something like) Mochikit is worthwhile 
since it makes development much more enjoyable and it should ease some 
of the cross-browser nightmares.

The exact type of license is of course Eric's decision.
For me, PD plus an exception clause like docutils seems fine.

cheers,
stefan