David Nalesnik <david.nales...@gmail.com> writes: >> On 2018-08-07 04:03, David Kastrup wrote: >> > >> > A license, as opposed to relying on people to stay nice, also protects >> > you against such worst case scenarios. >> > >> > Also many (but not necessarily all) code pieces from David may be >> > substantially derived from LilyPond code code licensed under the GPL. >> > In that case, the derived code cannot be licensed under different >> > conditions without being, in turn, in violation of the code it made use >> > of. > > Good grief :( I selected the MIT license because it's very common, and > in the spirit of, as you write, "feel free to use it, I don't care."
For original code you don't want to bother with in any manner (in particularly not suing over), it's a good choice. But it makes it easier for people to stay in compliance if you actually add the license headers to the files. As I said: most of our interactions are governed by us being nice reasonable people that feel they are part of a community. In particular, there are lots of exchanges posting sample code without ever bothering to mention licensing. Strictly speaking, that puts them under default copyright, not permitting copying and modification outside of personal use. Who is going to sue? Within this kind of semi-personal communication, someone feeling pissed off. Taking code and redistributing as part of a proprietary program: that may annoy some people. Taking code and redistributing under the MIT license: unlikely. But then someone else may take the code and redistribute as part of a proprietary program. Licensing for most programmers is an annoying mess to think about, but there are people whose profession is thinking about that annoying mess and copyright does not always stay with the people you interacted with originally since it is a transferable assets, and not all asset transfers are voluntary (for example, bankruptcy and death usually involve transfer of assets). Licenses are the hard underpinnings of what originally is (and some think should be) just nice people interacting with one another. The GPL and the GNU project were born basically when RMS fell flat on his face regarding Gosling Emacs and nice people staying nice. Now it seems nobody understood my motivation of contradicting Mason who stated that "software freedom" enabled modifying and using what you posted, and my pedantry caused me to contradict him because in that particular case it was first the implied permission of your reply with code enabling personal use, and the freedoms granted by your GitHub license on the referenced code which would have permitted modification and redistributing _if_ the conditions of the MIT license had been met, which they hadn't. So basically he relied on you being a nice guy. And that is what most interactions on the list actually boil down to. The licenses are the hard underpinnings, but most of the time we are actually walking on thin air. It's just that should we fall, usually the hard underpinnings are close enough that it doesn't matter. So why talk about it at all? Because I am a pedant. Sometimes I just like to dissect things and see what is actually involved. Sorry for annoying anybody. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
