janwas Posted February 8, 2010 Report Share Posted February 8, 2010 My worrying mind has come up with a bit of a legal concern about the code shared between my work and 0ad. The debug, CPU-specific and memory allocation stuff is of course especially useful for high-performance algorithms. I was mostly using it for research-only code that's not distributed, but there has recently been interest in a binary-only test app for purposes of reproducible research.Since we aren't allowed to release source code in this case, there is a conflict with the GPL. I remember reading Charles Bloom's rants about having to re-implement a big library of useful stuff for precisely this reason, and that's definitely something to avoid After discussion with Philip and Simon, who together with me logged 94% of the commits here, it seems advisable to switch to a more permissive license. The BSD license is frequently used, but the advertising clause seems unnecessary. ISC is slightly simpler, but has problematic wording according to the FSF. The Expat (MIT) license is essentially identical to the 2-clause BSD license and a tiny bit shorter, so that looks to be a good candidate.Basically, for the low-level stuff in lib/, the license says it can be used whenever and however as long as the copyright notice remains intact, and we disclaim all warranty. Since we'd like to release an EXE at work without running afoul of the GPL and given how hard it was to reach most contributors last time, I've gone ahead and committed this. If there are any objections, please don't hesitate to contact me - I'm happy to discuss it, but would also be willing to re-do the contribution in question if objections remain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ykkrosh Posted February 8, 2010 Report Share Posted February 8, 2010 Sounds good to me - I've updated LICENSE.txt to reflect the new status.(In case anyone is wondering what effect this has on the overall game: it has no effect. The game is now mostly a mixture of GPL and MIT, so a compiled version of the game has to follow both licenses, and since GPL is the most restrictive you effectively have to just follow the GPL the same as before.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
janwas Posted February 9, 2010 Author Report Share Posted February 9, 2010 Ooh, I'd forgotten about license.txt, thanks (did remember to include the .asm files, though, heh) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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