recent discussion

[Justin Sampson]

Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:
> I was convinced that the project could benefit from being released
> under the GNU Copyleft (General Public License, version 2)

The GPL was created for projects like this.

Someone else wrote:
> Just my two cents - I wouldn't use the GNU license if my life depended
> on it. Richard Stallman's philosophy is explicitly Communist - don't
> sanction his ideas by having anything to do with GNU.

Sounds like a good reason to support him... But, putting social politics
aside, computing freedom is one of the basic motivations behind Tunes;
everything about the Free Software Foundation seems exactly inline with
this project.

Eric Biederman wrote:
> This is good for code, (except maybe libraries) but for the matter of
> documents that we seem to generating in the review project the
> documents don't quit fit well under the same liscense.

As for libraries, the FSF also publishes a "GNU Library General Public
License." And documents published by the FSF are usually put under a
simple license, giving the copyright to the author and allowing free
distribution with no modification. That's probably what we want, too.

Chris Harris wrote:
> I'd have to say that I'm not quite so certain the GNU Public Licence
> is the best thing for TUNES. It does have advantages, as Fare has
> brought up, but I understand that it also has many "gotchas", such as
> making it difficult to get rid of the licence if the project
> eventually decides to take on a new direction.

That's not a "gotcha," that's the whole point of the GPL. Once the
software is free, no one can, or should, make it proprietary.

Chris continued:
> Perhaps we should wait to make this decision until we actually have
> some subproject that would directly benefit from it?

It may indeed be a good idea to hold off on the decision, at least until
there is actually something to be licensed.

By the way, the GPL and LGPL are available as
  ftp://ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/COPYING and
  ftp://ftp.gnu.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/COPYING.LIB

On another topic, Nathan Hawkins wrote:
> By no means forget to keep useful concepts, such as code, data,
> memory, etc. ;)

As I envision Tunes, we will get rid of those concepts! :)

- Justin Sampson - hoperift@armory.com -