[Box Backup-dev] Licensing (was: Who did what?)

[Ben Summers]

On 30 Jan 2006, at 13:20, Martin Ebourne wrote:

> Ben Summers <ben@fluffy.co.uk> wrote:
>> I don't think we resolved the copyright situation. I suppose with  
>> a  BSD license it's not so important, but we do need to be  
>> careful. I  don't think I can ask you all to assign your copyright  
>> away. At the  very least the copyright notice needs to change to  
>> acknowledge the  developers who actually did the work for 0.10.
>
> These things always seem to start flame wars unfortunately. I think  
> last time it was about even between people in favour of BSD and  
> those for GPL. Although I also got the impression (appologies if  
> I'm wrong) that of the people contributing the bias was somewhat  
> more GPL than BSD.

I understand why people should want GPL. BSD is rather giving things  
away.

>
> My main problem with the BSD licence is the attribution clause. Not  
> because I want to remove anything from Ben (indeed, the opposite!)  
> but because I think in the long term with multiple contributors  
> such a clause doesn't make sense.

Yes, I'm not sure what to do about this. In the short term, I can  
just change it to Ben Summers and Contributors or something, but in  
the longer term I hope this would be an inadequate representation of  
the effort put in.


> It causes licence compatibility issues as well.

My main problem with the GPL license is that it would stop me from  
using my own code in my own projects unless every single developer  
assigned me a license to use it outside the GPL. (And then why should  
I be a special case?) And I do use this code, because Box is a nice  
set of libraries for building stuff. Or I could fork from my last  
version, but then I wouldn't contribute to the open version because  
as they diverge, it'll get more and more hassle.

I would be happy with splitting things into Box (the framework) as  
BSD, and Box Backup (the application) as GPL. But how messy is that?

Ben