Forum OpenACS Development: Re: update of the xotcl packages for oacs

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7: Re: update of the xotcl packages for oacs (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 12/14/05 11:21 PM
This week i was/am very busy, so no time for fun stuff and reading forums. excuse the slow response.

Malte, concerning CVS: a couple of reasons:

  • the cvs rules say "only GPL code". Practically all of the code i write uses the liberal BSD style license (like Tcl) not GPL. It is used in many products, where GPL would be a problem. I must say that some of the most valueable feedbacks were coming from such installations, so i see no reason for changing this. Is it safe for me to ignore the statement from the CVS guidelines?

  • the xotcl request monitor depends on libthread. i have submitted a TIP for it, but so far there was descision about this AFAIK. Without libthread the package will spit out a bunch of error messages.

Malte, how do you manage your installations? you check out in part from say oacs-5-2 and part from HEAD? don't you get confused about this? what about the patches for bootstrap and api-browser. isn't running a mixed version asking for troubles?

malte: concerning the fresh install. i could reproduce the problem with the fresh install. It comes from the code that tries to convert old xowiki data into the new types and structures. As i think that most installations don't have big collections of xowiki pages yet, i have comment the section out and put xowiki 0.15 on http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/xowiki-doc/index.html

Ivan, there seems to be a bug in the content repository in oacs 5.1 in content_type__create_attribute(). Under oacs 5.2 the view contains the extra attributes (such as "instance_attributes", under 5.1 it does not. check: \d xowiki_page_instancex from pgsql. Is it a problem for you to upgrade to 5.2?

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10: GPL vs. BSD licenses (response to 7)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 12/15/05 10:17 AM
A BSD license doesn't effect OpenACS in the slightest, as BSD is fully GPL compatible. However, (my non-lawyer's understanding is that) as soon as someone starts contributing GPL code to a BSD codebase, that project effectively becomes GPL immediately. This is the viral nature of the GPL at work. (You could always rip out all suspected-GPL code, or just plain revert to the original BSD code, but as more contributions and improvements come in, that gets pretty unpleasant pretty fast...)

So, allowing code under non-GPL Open Source licenses into the OpenACS CVS repository is not a problem at all for OpenACS, but it might well be considered a problem by Gustaf or others who have written effectively independent packages or applications and published them under a BSD license. If a package really is independent (rather than a "derivative work" of the GPL'd OpenACS), and its author wants it to remain under a BSD license, then minimally, if I were the author, I'd include some license text in the code making that very very clear. Note that the AOLserver codebase has prominent notices top about the AOLserver license at the top of every major source file, etc.