I'm not a real license expert but I do play one on TV... The license should be visible, easy to find, and clearly associated with the code in question. Also, as Monty pointed out at ESUG, make sure it is possible for people to comply with the terms of your license. MIT license specifically requires the user to maintain the copyright notice, so make sure you *have* a copyright notice! I have no idea if this is relevant in this case--it's just a general observation but I mention it here because it's one of my big concerns with open source at the moment--but make sure the contributors (and not their employers) all own the intellectual property. In many (even most) jurisdictions, full-time employees may find that their employer by default owns much of the code they write, even what is written in their spare time. Contractors usually own their code by default but most companies who are on the ball will try to assign the ownership to them in the contract. Whether you're a full-time employee or a contractor, check your contracts before contributing to open-source. It is much easier to request a written IP exclusion in advance than to try to transfer ownership later. You're doing everyone a disservice if you pollute open source projects with code that has questionable IP ownership; the difficulty of defining derivative works makes it very hard to predict the difficulty of fixing the problem. Julian On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 3:23 AM, Sean P. DeNigris <sean@clipperadams.com> wrote:
Andres Valloud-4 wrote:
Well, since this discussion is public now :)
hee hee
Andres Valloud-4 wrote:
... exactly what seems to be the problem? Â The book talks about code that is often in the public Store repository. Â Is the problem that the code in the public Store repository doesn't have an MIT license? Â Or is the problem that the book that talks about the code in the public Store repository doesn't say "and the code has an MIT license"?
Would a license expert weigh in here? Â Andres, would it be difficult to add a note to the book specifying that the code in it is MIT? -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/A-Mentoring-Course-on-Smalltalk-Code-License-tp2714255... Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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