Licensing issues
From Omath
We need to decide on a license for all these tens of thousands of lines of code we've written (!!?!).
The options:
- GPL
- Tried and true.
- 66.41.2.157 says: Recommended. If we're going to put effort in to this, let's make sure it stays free.
- MIT
- About as open as it gets, without being in the public domain
- BSD
- Seems appropriate, given where most of the code has been written so far.
- Apache
- Similar to the MIT license, with some extra trademark related conditions. There's apparently some controversy as to whether it's GPL-compatible; Apache says yes, FSF says no.
- Public Domain
- Why not? Just give all away, don't retain any copyright at all, not even copyleft... My preferred option, until someone points out that this is stupid! --Scott 03:03, 28 October 2005 (EDT)
Other components
At present, we're distributing jdom.jar, from http://jdom.org, junit.jar and one-jar.jar . What licenses do we have to respect here?
- jdom
- is licensed under the Apache license, with the acknowledgement clause removed. This allows us to do anything we might want to do. In particular, there are no constraints on our license, simply because we want to distribute jdom.jar along with our executables.
- junit
- is licensed under the Common Public License. You can download junit, with source, from [1]. As far as I can tell, that satisfies all our licensing requirements :-)
One day, we'd love to have some graphics. JavaView would be perfect, but it's free as in beer, not as in speech... What to do?
