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