2718.us blog » google code

Changing from BSD to MIT License

2718.us — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:56:43 +0000

I’m changing the license on most (maybe all) of my active open-source projects, largely because the MIT license does not have as many blanks that have to be filled in as the New BSD license and the language is a bit simpler. To the best of my knowledge, any rights granted under the New BSD license are also granted under the MIT license, so this is really more of a housekeeping/paperwork issue than a conceptual or substantive change.

If this is of concern for some reason, for the things that were under BSD license and no longer are, the version-controlled repositories still have older versions that are BSD-licensed.

Converting a Google Code Project from Subversion to Mercurial

2718.us — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:01:33 +0000

The Google Code support wiki article ConvertingSvnToHg is quite easy to follow, but there is one thing worth noting that is kind of buried in the comments. Assuming you’re doing full history conversion, it is very useful to know that running hg convert locally is much much faster than running it on a remote SVN repository, so it is well worth using svnsync to make a local mirror of the SVN repository and then run hg convert on that.

Open Source (BSD/MIT License)

2718.us — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:24:58 +0000

I’ve released a few things as open source recently, under BSD or MIT license, hosted at Google Code.

asLJCore is the primary component of the LiveJournal client asLJ, managing all communication with the server.
YDDecode is a Cocoa class wrapped around some public-domain C code for decoding data encoded with YEnc.
NCIDStatusBarMenu is a utility to help pull NCID-based callerID notifications and display them as Growl notifications (among other things). I’d been meaning to update it for nearly 2 years with no success and the future isn’t looking much better, so I’m releasing the source instead.

(My musings on licensing below the cut.)Permissive BSD/MIT licenses because in writing asLJ among other things, I’ve had to work to find libraries, frameworks, components, classes, etc., that weren’t GPL-licensed so that I could continue to choose how I wanted to release my software. I am also heavily influenced by the simplicity of the BSD and MIT licenses compared to the lengthy GPL (and while the LGPL ought to be workable for many libraries, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the language of it–the LGPL is several paragraphs of modification to the GPL).

(The song lyrics and commentary for OpenBSD4.3 have a lot to do with how I feel about GPL versus BSD/MIT.)