Forum OpenACS Development: OpenACS on ohloh

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2: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 1)
Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 01/04/07 06:04 AM
cool!
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3: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/04/07 08:33 AM
Yes, indeed. Maybe we should include the rotating Badge somewhere on OpenACS website (I did this on our German Info page at http://cognovis.de/openacs, just at the bottom in the middle).

Furthermore it made me wonder about the Licence issues mentioned. Did they come because we have included the Ajax Libraries? And if they did, wouldn't it be better to download them while installing Ajaxhelper instead of including them in the openacs source code base? Not to mention that the include of the ajax libraries distorts those figures, but well, who am I to argue as long as it makes us look good.

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4: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 3)
Posted by Hamilton Chua on 01/04/07 09:52 AM
Yes, the BSD license appears to come from the ajax libraries.

In subversion, there is something called svn::externals where upon checkout of a package we can define external sources that would be fetched and downloaded along with the other code in the repository.

It's like a symlink to other svn repositories. All of the ajax libraries use subversion. When we switch Subversion, svn:externals would be a great option.

I wonder how easy/hard it would be to write tcl procs that do the downloading and integrate them to the install callback for Ajaxhelper ?

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5: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 4)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/04/07 10:34 AM
actually, not only: the xotcl stuff has the same license as XoTcl itself, which is BSD based. Tcl, tcllib, PostgreSQL hav a very similar license.

But, it complains only about Apache Software license, academic free license (never heard about it before) and the PHP license. i wonder, how the classification of licenses is done. if found the 4 files with the PHP license in acs-templating/www/resources/xinha-nightly/plugins/ImageManager
which are just part of the xinha tar ball and can be dropped without much harm. Where are the files with the Apache and the "academic free license"? I would like to have a button or an overview page, where one can see the license and metric values of ohloh.

if you look around, about every larger project lists some conflicts. I wonder, why distributing packages with different license from one place is a problem (all Linux distributions would have the same).

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6: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 01/05/07 05:35 PM
I once had a very long conversation with a lawyer who specialized in open source software and was a former developer himself. Take all this with a grain of salt and don't base any of your actions on it (hire a lawyer if you need to), but what I recall from the conversation is this:

  • For interpreted languages like in our environment, you do not need to worry about license conflicts unless you are mixing the code with different licenses within the same FILE.

  • There is a sort of math involved with these licenses. The big thing to watch out for is the GPL license, because it is viral. The most liberal/free license is the BSD and MIT licenses, because they place less limitations on your activities. But with GPL, you have to be careful when you mix GPL code with anything else.

    Basically:

    GPL + GPL compatible code = GPL code
    GPL + non GPL compatible code = PROBLEM

BSD/MIT licenses are GPL compatible by the way.

What this means is that developers, who are accustomed to freely copying and pasting code between files, have to do the annoying task of keeping track of which licenses are associated with each file.

And when you copy and paste between files with different licenses, you have to be sure that you're not mixing licenses that are incompatible.

As far as I understand it, there is really no problem with OpenACS having incompatible licenses within its codebase, except for the fact that developers have to be careful not to mix the code. And there is the additional issue that we claim all OpenACS code is GPLed, which is either not true, or problematic if you're including non-GPL compatible code.

The solution when you have mixed code that are not license compatible is to rip out all the code that was originally from the non-compatible license. Fun.

Jade

PS An additional thing that people have to watch out for with GPL code is the definition of "distribution". If you "distribute" modified GPL code, you have to make the source code available. There are some parts of the definition that the legal community hasn't sorted out yet. But I'm not going to get into that now.

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7: Re: OpenACS on ohloh (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 01/05/07 05:39 PM
Another thing I found interesting about that link is that it said something I've never heard anyone mention before: that OpenACS is one of the most active open source projects in the world.