In addition to what other people say, and other caveats apply (I am not a lawyer, etc.).
On Tuesday 15 September 2009 04:14:50 Steve Bertrand wrote: > Ok. > > Some of you have probably come across my post on monks, but I ask here > with a bit more detail. > > My project is a suite for Internet Service Provider management. The core > engine is topped off with a web gui interface. This project contains > about 7,800 lines of code, POD and unit tests. > > The HTML/email templates are separate, but I do intend to integrate them > into the core of the project. > > There are also a few other personal packages which I've written that I > tap into, but they are better left separate ( RadiusMgmt, EmailMgmt > etc). These will be re-written, because what I know now, I didn't know > then. > > The company that employs me is very small, and although I don't believe > there will ever be a problem with giving my code away, I want to take > advantage of the fact that I have never signed anything to say I > ``can't'' give it away. I'm at a stage where some of our staff is > testing, so before the powers-that-be decide that this is company code: You should make sure. An employer may make claim to code you've written on job time, and for job purposes. So you should get their explicit permission for releasing the source into the wild as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). > > What is the quickest and easiest way to ensure my code is truly licensed > as public domain, if I don't feel that the code is quite CPAN worthy? You may wish to read what I wrote about it here: http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/open-source/foss-licences-wars/ Also see the "Coverage and Comments" section at the bottom - some good stuff there. As other people noted, putting code under the public domain is problematic because "the Public Domain is not widely understood or accepted internationally, and because licensing code under the Public Domain may not be possible." (to quote the article). See: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html You can get pretty close to the American conception of the Public Domain using a permissive licence. The MIT/X11 Licence ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License ) explicitly allows sub-licensing, and the current interpretation of the 2-clause or 3-clause BSD licences is similar. There's also the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license which is similar to the BSD, but uses a simpler language, and is favoured by the OpenBSD project for their own project. According to what I've heard from some people, such licences require that the entire licence be present in each source file. Though with similar and longer permissive licences such as the Apache Licence, this is not necessary. Note that you should be sure that by "public domain" you actually mean that people can take your code, and create derived copies under different (possibly non-open-source) licences. If that's not what you want, make sure you license your code under weak-copyleft or strong-copyleft licenses. (See my article for a description). As someone noted the Artistic License 2.0 is not exactly weak copyleft, but rather "weak-weak-copyleft", in the sense that one can still distribute modified binaries under different licences. I'm not aware of a good weak copyleft that's also compatible with GPLv2 and above, and I went over all the GPL-compatible licences on: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html > > Do I put it somewhere with a license in it? Can I simply share it with > someone else, with a license in it? > Assuming you get a green light from the company that contracted you, you can host it somewhere like http://sourceforge.net/ , http://berlios.de/ http://code.google.com/hosting/ , http://github.com/ , http://savannah.gnu.org/ , http://bitbucket.org/ , and the list goes on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities > Steve > Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What Makes Software Apps High Quality - http://shlom.in/sw-quality Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
