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explain license thing

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Thomas Levine 2016-01-31 16:36:03 +00:00
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@ -62,3 +62,44 @@ Other interesting package managers
Windows
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Try running Urchin in Windows somehow. I guess CygWin.
Consider copyleft licenses
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ScraperWiki owns the original version of Urchin (Thomas Levine did the early
work as part of his work for ScraperWiki.) and originally licensed it under an
MIT-style license. Other people made changes after this original ScraperWiki
version. As of January 2016, they are just Thomas Levine (when he wasn't
working for ScraperWiki) and Michael Klement.
The original license was MIT just because that's what ScraperWiki put on
everything. Should we change the license?
The MIT-style license grants pretty much all rights. It says that you need
to attribute when you redistribute source code, but you don't
necessarily have to redistribute source code.
A copyleft license adds the restriction that modified versions of the
code need to be licensed under the same license. GNU licenses in
particular require that source code be released if non-source versions are
released, and the different GNU licenses differ in what how the
non-source version is defined. (The original, GPL, discusses compiled
binaries.) Copyleft doesn't mean anything specific for commercial use.
MIT-licensed code can be modified and then licensed as GPL, because MIT
license allows that, but GPL code can't be modified as MIT, because MIT
doesn't allow that. And if we get all of the authors to agree on it, we
can always add whatever crazy license we want, regardless of what we
have already.
The distinction between MIT-style and GNU-something might matter quite little
in the case of Urchin.
1. Urchin is written in an interpreted language (shell), so it might be
hard to distribute usefully without providing the source code.
2. Urchin just runs tests; it doesn't get compiled with the rest of the
code (also because it's in shell). Thus, I think a GPL license on
Urchin wouldn't infect the code being tested.
This is as far as I have gotten with contemplating license changes. For now
we're sticking with the original MIT-style license, but it's easy to change
licenses later.