[liblouis-liblouisxml] Licensing of jlouis to make it more suitable for others
- From: Michael Whapples <mwhapples@xxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:09:05 +0100
Hello,
I am writing this on the liblouis list because I think this is where the
people who may wish to see this will be found (John Boyer, John Gardner
and Christian Egli asked about this) and others here may be interested
or may wish to comment.
I realise that the QPL which I chose to publish jlouis
(http://bitbucket.org/mwhapples/jlouis) may not be suitable for some
projects. Now the first thing to notice is that I am prepared to
negotiate licenses here, may be someone could help me find a suitable
one for external projects whilst giving me the protection I desire.
So the protection I desire from a license: In short I generally have
quite a high standard for quality (I should mention here, I don't feel
jlouis is actually complete yet, more work should be done before I could
make a 1.0 release) and I was aware that there were some suggestions
where people wanted to make alterations I had to strongly advise against
and could never include in my own version. My concern from that is if I
were to refuse certain alterations to be included in my official version
then people may just fork the code. In such an event I want to ensure
that those who fork the code must make it very clear what their changes
are, therefore guaranteeing that I would have no association to any
change I do not like. Ideally I would also want it that any fork has to
be renamed, again this is to help make it clear what is my version and
what is a modified version. I also would like to have the license make
it clear that any modified version is not endorsed by me and possibly
even include a clause about not allowing my name, etc to be used in
advertising (like in the old BSD license, but its fairly rare to find
licenses including that now).
While the QPL does not require the renaming of modified versions its
clauses on modifications having to be distributed separately (eg. as
patches) certainly offered me strong disassociation with any
modifications I do not make.
I'll certainly give the LGPL another close reading to see whether that
offers me the protection I am asking for, but if any others have
suggestions which may also be suitable for me and other projects who may
wish to use jlouis then make the suggestions.
Finally I will come to the copyright matter. At the moment I see very
little advantage for me to hand over copyright to abilitiessoft and
viewplus, jlouis seems to work well enough as a third party module and I
see little advantage to including it actually in liblouis.
Michael Whapples
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
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