On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 12:47:11AM +0000, Carlos Pereira wrote:
Hi John,
Thank you very much for your interest on this issue!
Regarding the license, of course I agree with you. I just thought
it was a bit too pretentious to add a detailed legal statement at
this stage, so I added the public domain notice just to make sure
that this is free code in all respects.
I am doing some cosmetic cleaning on the code, and I plan to
release a new version in the next few days. Then I will add a
full legal statement for each file as you suggested.
Regarding the license, I will have a good look at the license you
suggested. Other options could be perhaps a double license: BSD
for everyone who wants to merge this code directly, LGPL for the
GTK team (I suppose this is the current GTK license?). Does this
make sense?
It could work. But if you're after simplicity, then IMHO the CC0 license
fills that role better than a dual BSD / LGPL and would still allow those
projects to use your work.
The choice of licence is of course yours - my concern was that the way you
had expressed it could have been misunderstood and/or legally challenged.
The "I place this work in the public domain" statement, is problematic, because
the only jurisitiction I know of where this is explicitly possible is Australia.
In the UK it is utterly impossible and in the USA jurists disagree. I don't
think it's possible in most European countries either.
Of course - it would not normally cause a problem, so long as the author (you)
is available to clarify questions. But I read of a case where a software
developer had died without properly licensing his work, and his widow was trying
to retract permissions which he had seemed to have granted.
I am not a lawyer (but I do read opinions of qualified lawyers who write about
such matters).
Regards,
John
PS. I will give your functions a trial in the next few weeks.
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