Re: Disclaimer
On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Robert Shiels wrote: A lot of you write and distribute free perl code. What do you do about copyright and disclaimers in the code itself. I've had a look at a few examples and it seems you don't really bother. I think it is probably worth doing, and we will need one for the NotMattsScripts project, so does anyone have a good concise copyright and disclaimer notice for free Perl code? I've googled around and can't find anything I like. The simplist would be # Name - brief description. (c) Copyright 2001 A Nother # # This is free software available under the same license as perl itself # This sofwate comes with NO WARRANTY. For more information see URL or FILE. The NO WARRANTY bit is fairly important, as is specifiying uunder what license it is made availab.e - common are Public Doman (not teh default, default is all rights reserved), BSD artistic license (fairly similar) and the GNU GPL and LGPL. I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig it can be to keep a derived work compliant. It will now take as long to audit the changes made to mny derived work of mwforum as it did to do some of the debugging. This is a good thing and a bad thing - It does mean you keep more control over your work, but at the same time it means that there is little reward for doing a major piece of work on somebody elses code, even if you replace 99% of it, its still entirely their copyright and not yours, so you essentially hand over your moral rights to waht you have done. I could be wrong of course - buit that is how it seems. A. -- A HREF = "http://termisoc.org/~betty" Betty @ termisoc.org /A "As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)
Re: Disclaimer
Aaron Trevena sent the following bits through the ether: I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig it can be to keep a derived work compliant. Yup, that's why I like it so much. *This week* I'm a fan of the GPL, and how it keeps the community going. [insert rant about Australians stealing your GPL / AL webmail program, changing the logo, and selling it...] Leon -- Leon Brocard.http://www.astray.com/ Iterative Software..http://yapc.org/Europe/ ... Quick! Act as if nothing has happened!
Re: Disclaimer
On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 09:59:20AM +0100, Aaron Trevena wrote: I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig it can be to keep a derived work compliant. It will now take as long to audit the changes made to mny derived work of mwforum as it did to do some of the debugging. This is a good thing and a bad thing - It does mean you keep more control over your work, but at the same time it means that there is little reward for doing a major piece of work on somebody elses code, even if you replace 99% of it, its still entirely their copyright and not yours, so you essentially hand over your moral rights to waht you have done. I could be wrong of course - buit that is how it seems. I think you misunderstand. YOUR code in it is still yours. However, because the work as a whole is a derived work from that of the original author, he can impose conditions on how the work as a whole is distributed. That can include mandating a particular licence for the work. You may, if you wish, distribute parts that are entirely yours in any way you see fit. You can even do that in addition to having a GPLed version of your work as part of the derived work. -- David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/ This is a signature. There are many like it but this one is mine. ** I read encrypted mail first, so encrypt if your message is important **
Re: Disclaimer
From: "David Cantrell" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 10 April 2001 10:40 Subject: Re: Disclaimer On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 09:58:41AM +0100, dcross - David Cross wrote: Anything I release always has the following copyright and I think that a number of module and script authors use a very similar form of words out of respect for Larry. Dave... Copyright (C) 2000, Magnum Solutions Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. It's also worth nothing that both the Artistic and GP licences include a disclaimer, so you're sorted for that too. 1. I want anything I write to be free for others to use and generally bugger about with. 2. I don't want anyone to be allowed to sell my code, or to sell anything closely derived from it. 3. I don't want to be sued by someone who hosed their machine while running my software. Will any of the artistic/GPL/BSD licences work here? Will yours Dave (Cross) work, as I like that the best as it is so short :-) /Robert
RE: Disclaimer
From: Robert Shiels [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2001 11:28 AM From: "David Cantrell" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 09:58:41AM +0100, dcross - David Cross wrote: Anything I release always has the following copyright and I think that a number of module and script authors use a very similar form of words out of respect for Larry. Dave... Copyright (C) 2000, Magnum Solutions Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. It's also worth nothing that both the Artistic and GP licences include a disclaimer, so you're sorted for that too. 1. I want anything I write to be free for others to use and generally bugger about with. 2. I don't want anyone to be allowed to sell my code, or to sell anything closely derived from it. 3. I don't want to be sued by someone who hosed their machine while running my software. Will any of the artistic/GPL/BSD licences work here? Will yours Dave (Cross) work, as I like that the best as it is so short :-) You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your point 2. Dave... The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please re-send this communication to the sender and delete the original message or any copy of it from your computer system.
RE: Disclaimer
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, dcross - David Cross wrote: [broken quoting snipped] You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your point 2. The GPL doesn't stop you selling the derived work. What it *does* do, however is to say that the derived work must be under a GPL-compatible license, which makes it, in general, uneconomical to sell the work. MBM -- Matthew Byng-Maddick Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 20 8980 5714 (Home) http://colondot.net/ Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 7956 613942 (Mobile) standards n.: The principles upon which we reject other people's code.
RE: Disclaimer
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote: On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, dcross - David Cross wrote: [broken quoting snipped] You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your point 2. The GPL doesn't stop you selling the derived work. What it *does* do, however is to say that the derived work must be under a GPL-compatible license, which makes it, in general, uneconomical to sell the work. The common mis-perception about the GPL is that you can't sell or profit from selling GPL software. You can sell at any price you like, the software with or without nice pakcaging and manuals, you can sell the support at any price you like and you can sell the manuals at any price you like. All you have to do is publish it under the GPL and make the source available at cost price or reasonabley close. A. -- A HREF = "http://termisoc.org/~betty" Betty @ termisoc.org /A "As a youngster Fred fought sea battles on the village pond using a complex system of signals he devised that was later adopted by the Royal Navy. " (this email has nothing to do with any organisation except me)
RE: Disclaimer
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote: On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote: On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, dcross - David Cross wrote: [broken quoting snipped] You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your point 2. The GPL doesn't stop you selling the derived work. What it *does* do, however is to say that the derived work must be under a GPL-compatible license, which makes it, in general, uneconomical to sell the work. The common mis-perception about the GPL is that you can't sell or profit from selling GPL software. Erm. Why don't you quote my message and repeat what it says... :) You can sell at any price you like, the software with or without nice pakcaging and manuals, you can sell the support at any price you like and you can sell the manuals at any price you like. All you have to do is publish it under the GPL and make the source available at cost price or reasonabley close. No. You cannot sell the source and binaries seperately. The point is that anyone having bought your code/binaries is free to do what they like, including giving to all their friends, so it is uneconomical to *sell* stuff under the GPL. This is why it's *effectively* free-beer free. RMS used to sell the tapes for the EMACS shell^Wtext-editor at way more than cost price of the tapes, and people still bought them. They could have got a copy from someone who already had the tapes or from somewhere else, but they *chose* to have the tapes. MBM -- Matthew Byng-Maddick Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 20 8980 5714 (Home) http://colondot.net/ Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 7956 613942 (Mobile) standards n.: The principles upon which we reject other people's code.
Re: Disclaimer
From: "dcross - David Cross" [EMAIL PROTECTED] You want the GPL for that. Which means that you can't use my copyright message as it includes the Artisitc License - which doesn't disallow your point 2. I think therefore GPL will be good. People can sell my code, but as I will be giving it away free, they will probably not get many customers :-) Thanks. /Robert
Re: Disclaimer
On Mon Apr 9 13:09:31 2001, Robert Shiels wrote: A lot of you write and distribute free perl code. What do you do about copyright and disclaimers in the code itself. I've had a look at a few examples and it seems you don't really bother. I think it is probably worth doing, and we will need one for the NotMattsScripts project, so does anyone have a good concise copyright and disclaimer notice for free Perl code? I've googled around and can't find anything I like. I do this: =head1 COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2001 Marty Pauley. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. b) the Perl Artistic License. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. =cut The FSF site recommended this. I just use the GPL with non-perl code. The FSF people say this: The license of Perl. This license is the disjunction of the Artistic license and the GNU GPL--in other words, you can choose either of those two licenses. It qualifies as a free software license, but it may not be a real copyleft. It is compatible with the GNU GPL because the GNU GPL is one of the alternatives. We recommend you use this license for any Perl package you write, to promote coherence and uniformity in Perl programming. Outside of Perl, we urge you not to use this license; it is better to use just the GNU GPL. The Artistic license. We cannot say that this is a free software license because it is too vague; some passages are too clever for their own good, and their meaning is not clear. We urge you to avoid using it, except as part of the disjunctive license of Perl. Have a look at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/license-list.html -- Marty PGP signature
Re: Disclaimer
On Tue Apr 10 11:27:48 2001, Robert Shiels wrote: 1. I want anything I write to be free for others to use and generally bugger about with. 2. I don't want anyone to be allowed to sell my code, or to sell anything closely derived from it. Then you cannot use GPL, Artistic, BSD, or any free software license. You might want to check out some of the "Let's jump on the Open Source Bandwagon" licenses from Sun and Apple. -- Marty PGP signature
Re: Disclaimer
On Tue Apr 10 13:59:15 2001, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote: No. You cannot sell the source and binaries seperately. Yes you can. If you do, you must sell the source at cost price. -- Marty PGP signature
Re: Disclaimer
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Aaron Trevena wrote: The simplist would be # Name - brief description. (c) Copyright 2001 A Nother # # This is free software available under the same license as perl itself # This sofwate comes with NO WARRANTY. For more information see URL or FILE. The NO WARRANTY bit is fairly important, as is specifiying uunder what license it is made availab.e - common are Public Doman (not teh default, default is all rights reserved), BSD artistic license (fairly similar) and the GNU GPL and LGPL. The artisitic license isn't worth the paper it's printed on... I habitually use the GPL, I have only recently realised how much of a pig it can be to keep a derived work compliant. It will now take as long to audit the changes made to mny derived work of mwforum as it did to do some of the debugging. This is a good thing and a bad thing - It does mean you keep more control over your work, but at the same time it means that there If you want to keep control, use something like the Apache-modified BSD license. This allows you to keep the name * for your scripts. is little reward for doing a major piece of work on somebody elses code, even if you replace 99% of it, its still entirely their copyright and not yours, so you essentially hand over your moral rights to waht you have done. Hmmm I would have thought that how much of the work you replace defines how tightly bound you are by the license of the previous work. I could be wrong of course - buit that is how it seems. I don't know. IANAL. MBM -- Matthew Byng-Maddick Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 20 8980 5714 (Home) http://colondot.net/ Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] +44 7956 613942 (Mobile) standards n.: The principles upon which we reject other people's code.
