[extropy-chat] Open Source Licensing - help!

[Samantha Atkins]

It is not that hard really.  It sounds like the old BSD license would  
be sufficient for your needs.  No extra hoops.

- samantha

On Jul 23, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Emlyn wrote:

> 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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