2718.us blog » open source http://2718.us/blog Miscellaneous Technological Geekery Tue, 18 May 2010 02:42:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 Changing from BSD to MIT License http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/29/changing-from-bsd-to-mit-license/ http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/29/changing-from-bsd-to-mit-license/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:56:43 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=246 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.

]]> http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/29/changing-from-bsd-to-mit-license/feed/ 0 Open Source (BSD/MIT License) http://2718.us/blog/2009/09/06/open-source-bsd-license/ http://2718.us/blog/2009/09/06/open-source-bsd-license/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:24:58 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=170 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.)

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