(Artemis) Open source considerations

[Parasyte]

It is not uncommon to use multiple licenses on a single project. (See: Dual-Licensing) In fact, Mozilla uses a "Tri-licensing" scheme, which gives their users a choice between MPL, GPL, or LGPL licenses; whichever best suits the user's needs.

So don't limit yourself to sticking it out for just one license. (There is no "one license to rule them all")

On the other hand, it would be perfectly acceptable to just not include dependencies in your project. If you require modified version of those dependencies (because maybe one of the libs is broken, or you which to add features) the simple solution is to instead provide patches for the dependencies; your makefile might even fetch the dependencies from official distribution points (some third-part CVS/SVN, for example) and then apply your patches and build it. OpenBSD's ports system works in this manner, and effectively at that.


Thus you end up with a complete separation of project files vs dependency files; each of which can use whatever licensing system they please, all without conflict. Something to consider.

[Lazy Bastard]

Hmm. Wouldn't that mean we couldn't distribute compiled binaries?

Also, I've seen more than one license say explicitly, "You may not use ANY part of this source if [blah blah condition isn't true in your project]"...if we use pieces of various source with more than one license, won't our project have to adhere to all pieces of all licenses (many of which may contradict)?

[Parasyte]

Then don't distribute binaries until you've rewritten the conflicting portions. I don't know what else to tell you.

GNU did it.

[Lazy Bastard]

Bleh...it'll be something to consider.

[misfire]

Something of interest to us:

"Producing Open Source Software"
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
http://producingoss.com/

[Parasyte]

I think LB posted that link around here somewhere. I discovered it earlier and let him know about it. It has some good, practical information.

[misfire]

For Artemis version 0.1, I've chosen the GPL.

Apart from the philosophical reasons, artemis.elf is statically linked to libconfig and libcheats (both LGPL) leaving me no other choice.

Anybody got any objections?

(Hopefully not. I'm tired of this legal crap.)

[Lazy Bastard]

I'm all for it (and I'm tired of thinking of which license to use, as well).

[misfire]

Hm, actually there might still be a problem with GPL.

According to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-...atibleLicenses, GPL is incompatible with AFL, which is the license used by the PS2SDK. I don't know if this is a problem on the binary level (linking PS2SDK libraries), but on the source level it certainly is (we cannot incorporate any PS2SDK source code directly).

This is starting to annoy me.

EDIT: I'm asking for advice here: http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=185

EDIT 2: If AFL vs. GPL really is a problem (and I guess it is), we need to change Artemis' license to AFL. It would still be possible to use libconfig and libcheats, provided they're dynamically linked to artemis.elf as ERL modules. Also, I'm the author of libcheats and can relicense it under any terms. And maybe we can replace libconfig with our own configuration library...

[Lazy Bastard]

Ack, I forgot about that incompatibility...we've discussed this before.

Eh, if you can reimplement libconfig as such, and either do the same with libcheat or relicense it, I guess that's the way we should go.

[misfire]

This is giving me headache. I also found some license incompatibilities in the ps2dev SVN itself. For example, ps2link is violating the GPL by statically linking in ps2smap.irx.

Too bad that the PS2SDK doesn't use the 3-clause BSD license like PSPSDK does. At least dual licensing would be helpful. IMHO, using AFL only was a big mistake.

EDIT: Actually, there're a lot of projects that don't care about license compatibility. Another example is Mega Man's kernel loader which is GPL-licensed but also includes AFL code from SMS etc.

Maybe I should be a little bit more relaxed about it. Must be my Teutonic thoroughness...

[Parasyte]

AFL sounds pretty lame, to me.

The only advice I can give, you probably won't like. So I won't even bother at this point.

[misfire]

Yeah, AFL sucks. Anyway, I'll leave it as it is for now.

Feel free to give me an advice. I can always ignore it.

[Parasyte]

Fair enough; reimplement all of the useful pieces of PS2SDK and then they can shove that AFL up their asses.

[Lazy Bastard]

I figured he was going to say that, heh.