On 09/20/2012 06:37 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 03:18:20PM +0200, [email protected] wrote:
On 09/20/2012 02:57 PM, Dave Neary wrote:
IMHO, the license matters at earliest when you're downloading (so not on
the front page),
Disagree. It should be on the front page. For various reasons. The
main reason being that it is a fundamentally important thing to
know. A short thing like "Open Source mainly under ASL 2.0,
specifics here" where "here" is a link to the detailed license page.
Doesn't hurt at all and makes it clear upfront what we are doing here.
I agree with Jan. I'm obviously far from your target user or
contributor (unless they are the sort that likes to or has to check
with their lawyers, which could well be the case). However, two things
that I find extremely annoying about so many project websites are (1)
you have to go through multiple steps to get *any* idea about how the
software is licensed, and (2) when licensing information is given, it
tends to be inaccurately simple (because it is rarely the case that
licensing can be reduced to one license). A statement like Jan
suggests addresses both of these problems.
+1
I think we should also consider that not all companies are as well
versed in open source licensing as our employers. Often, a lawyer is the
*first* decision maker on whether or not a software package is OK for an
engineering team to use. As with all teams, legal teams are also often
underresourced and these folks don't necessarily understand FOSS
licensing matters intimately. Whatever we can do to make their way
smoother, the more likely they will be to not simply reject oVirt out of
hand because they could not find the information they needed easily.
If we don't want detailed licensing info on the front page, have
something in the footer that says "oVirt is open source" and have this
link to a page with *detailed* licensing information, not just for the
code but for the docs, iconography, etc.
Best,
LH
Sadly, if it's a project I'm just finding out about, I don't trust the
mere statement that it's "open source", and even when that's a
reasonably accurate statement it isn't specific enough to be helpful
to people who care about these things.
- Richard
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Leslie Hawthorn
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards @ Red Hat
identi.ca/lh
twitter.com/lhawthorn
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