[albatross-users] Plans for next release?

[Michael C. Neel]

On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 03:01, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> May I suggest the following:
>       * If you consider the BSD license, the X11 (aka. MIT) license is
>         simpler, equivalent, and less prone to problems. In any case,
>         the "modified BSD license" (without the advertising clause) is
>         certainly more welcome than the old one.

We are going with the BSD, the newer version.  The no endorsement clause
is important to the powers that be, which is understandable.  Plus, this
is the license of Albatross, which must be maintained as well, and
solves any possible license conflict issues.

>       * If you consider the PSF license, make sure you use the most
>         recent version. Certain older versions have a number of
>         problems.

Though projects are often release under the PSF, I've come to learn the
PSF isn't desiging the license to be used that way.  As such, reusing
the PSF license would need a bit more time for me to get past legal (who
have already seen a bsd lic from me on our axe project).


>       * If you can, consider the GPL or LGPL.

Since we are a company that mixes closed and open source code in a
project, I am not a fan of using the GPL.  I do not think it's needed to
have a clause to require modification to be provided back in source.  In
fact, the ability of a BSD license to allow the source to be closed is a
reassurance to our clients - basically they know no laywer will pop up
on their door step asking for the code for their internal systems
because we used something opensource to build it.  And in pratice, there
would be no benefit to having their code open anyway, it's too specific
to them to be of use elsewhere.

In general I like the BSD license because it protects the developers and
gives freedom to users, where as the the GPL places requirments upon the
users.

> I'm not a lawyer, and I don't mean to provoke, but my own experience and
> that shared by others suggests that these are points worth considering.

Always worth taling about, and I think too often these points are overl
looked!


> An alternative to SourceForge is Debian's Alioth, which uses the Gforge
> software in use at SourceForge. Alioth has less projects and thus less
> load, but it may be too unpolished for this use. It's run by volunteers,
> so response times to bug reports may vary. Look at
> http://alioth.debian.org/
> 

We are fedora people here, so we can't cope with anything debian.  J/K
=p.  It might be a week before we get the project going (legal can be
slow to read two paragraphs, lol), but we've used SF in the past so
we'll probably be lazy and just use it now.

Mike

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michael.neel at mediapulse.com
vice president of information systems
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800.380.4514

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