[extropy-chat] Open Source Licensing - help!

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Sat Jul 23 11:37:36 UTC 2005


Hi all,

I thought some people here might know their open source stuff.

I'm putting together a simple .net library for monitoring files for
changes at the moment. I've written a bit about it at the bottom of
the post, but it's really quite banal. The point of doing it for me is
in learning how the open source world works, and the services
available to its citizens.

I was hoping to host it on SourceForge, but found that it's not just a
matter of getting an account and throwing a project at it. You have to
know all kinds of difficult detail such as the exact open source
license conditions that you want to release the code under, detail
about what the project is, etc etc. It appears that a human moderator
then assesses your project for worthiness, before it is allowed on
SourceForge.

Firstly, can anyone advise me on the open source licenses? What I'm
trying to achieve is to put useful code out there (give back to the
net!), and also to create the beginning of a reputation, or at least
to find out what it might take. So I'm happy for people to use my code
for commercial products without paying me any money, but I guess I
want some kind of acknowledgement.

What I'd like is to require users of the library to include some kind
of acknowledgement in their product, even just in a readme file, or
maybe show a logo for the library in an about box or something
similar. I'd like people to be able to use it in closed source,
commercial projects without the possibility of compromising their IP
(ie: I don't want to open-source infect them). Just the
acknowledgement. So far I've looked at GPL (no! too ideology bound,
and unusable by closed source people), LGPL (still a worry, I think
closed source people would still steer clear), and BSD (a bit too
open, I want some form of acknowledgement that the library is being
used in a product). As for derived works, I guess they need to be
bound to carry the same license conditions as the original library,
I'm not clear here.

So does anyone have any advice?

Also, does anyone know if the bar is set higher than I will be able to
jump, regarding project approval on SourceForge? Is it the right place
to host a new tiny open source project, or is there something better?

What the library is:
The library is a simple .net library for monitoring files for changes.
It will be able to support different paradigms (append-only log files,
text files where changes appear anywhere (like source code), binary
files that have internal updates and might grow or shrink (like
database files), etc). I've got a bunch of stuff to base on it, like
 - a realtime viewer for log files with user definable filtering,
colouring, based on regular expressions,
 - a windows service that can monitor log files, again with user
definable filtering, alerts, etc, based on regular expressions
 - maybe a file replication facility for any of these types of files
 - maybe a source control system based on the diff capabilities of the library
 - etc etc etc
I know these kinds of products already exist, but I can't find open
source, .net based code for this functionality. File change monitoring
seems really low tech, but you can build some really strong higher
level functionality on it, gaining robustness and a loose-coupling
that I really favour in enterprise applications.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *



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