Re: RPG 'CPAN' site

I'm gonna throw a few ideas out here:

On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, John Taylor wrote:
>
> "b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
>     whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
>     part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
>     parties under the terms of this License."
>
> Doesn't this mean I can't charge for an application that I've developed, if
> said application makes use any Toolkit code?
>

    1) I'm not a lawyer, but I believe there is a difference between
        "derived from" and "linked with".  In other words, you could
        tell an end user to install the "iseries toolkit" and then you
        could bind your program to the installed service program and
        still charge for your own software, since you are only linking
        to it.  ("linking" is the term the rest of the world uses for
        what we refer to as "binding")

        Heck, you could even charge for the service of downloading and
        installing iseries toolkit on the end-user's machine.  You
        just can't charge for it directly.

       When they say "derived from" or "contains" it means that you
        can't take David's code, and include it inside your own compiled
        program, or take it and modify it to behave slightly differently
        (i.e. create something "derived" from it) and then charge for it.
        If you do include it, it must be free.

    2) Don't let yourself get locked into the GPL.  Despite what some
        Linux people would have you believe, it's not the only option,
        and it's not even always the best option.   (Frankly, the GPL
        has been nothing but a headache to me.)

        Here are the various licenses that are approved by the
        open source initiative:
        Go to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

        On the projects where I've had my choice, I use the BSD license.
        It requires people to keep my copyright notice intact, so I'll
        always get credit for my work.  It also protects me from
        liability.  Aside from that, anyone can pretty much use my
        products as they will.  People tell me that I'm giving too much
        away doing this -- but, I'm not doing these things to promote The
        Religion of Open Source, but rather to give something back to the
        community.  A community that's mostly business people.

    3) If we are to have a "Comprehensive" "CPAN" type of site, we need
        to be willing to host projects containing a variety of the
        open source licenses.   If we say "David Morris' site will be
        our RPG CPAN" and then say "everything on David's site must be
        released under the GPL" then that's not going to work.

       Someone who develops an application HAS THE RIGHT to choose which
        license he wants to release it under.  So, if you want to be
        comprehensive, you MUST allow any open source license.

I'd be interested in including my open-source projects in such a site if
it was well set up.  For info on my projects see:

        http://klement.dstorm.net/oss.html