[admin] Account Request

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:50 AM, Elliott Slaughter
<elliottslaughter at gmail.com> wrote:

>> My *biased* recommendation is the MIT licence
>> <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php>, but whatever
>> suits *your* needs is fine: in the absence of a public notice on the
>> clnet site, assume that any license which fulfills DFSG
>> <http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines> is fine.
>
> Thanks for the advice. Any particular reason you like the MIT license?
> (I know MIT is less restrictive than the GPL, but I really don't know
> much more than that.)

MIT is essentially the same as releasing things into public domain, in
the sense that it does not restrict users ability to do anything they
want with the code -- including stealing it. I am not interested in
telling people what they are and are not allowed to do.

GPL restricts users ability to use code in circumstances where
releasing the sources of the aggregate is not a possibility. Also: the
moment you accept a GPL licenced *contribution* you cannot relicence
without getting agreement from all contributors. Hence, GPL projects
are almost never relicenced -- and almost always it happens, it can be
asked if the relicencing was legally sound: Joe Random Hacker who
contributed a few patched two years back might not have been
consulted.

Itent of LGPL is nice: don't steal this code, but it won't contaminate
anything. Unfortunately LGPL has plenty of language that doesn't make
sense for Lisp. If you want LGPL like effect, use GPL plus the
classpath exception (or something like that), and hope your and your
users lawyers agree.

(All GPL and LGPL comments above are re. version 2 -- I am not
familiar with the new versions.)

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus