Re: [Chicken-users] On eggs and their licensing

[Jim Ursetto]

On Jun 2, 2010, at 9:43, Stephen Eilert <address@hidden> wrote:

> As I have some code that I would like to contribute back to Chicken,
> in the form of eggs, I have started to look into the licensing issue.
> I've asked that on #chicken, and the response was that I should choose
> my own license.

Good advice.

> Sure enough, the eggs page show *a mess*. 

> BSD: 168 eggs
> GPL2: 47 eggs
> Public domain: 25 eggs
> LGPL2.1: 9 eggs
> MIT: 11 eggs
> Other: 31 eggs

Looks pretty straightforward to me.

> This will indubitably generate a flame fest about which license is
> best.

Certainly.

>  Some deviation is unavoidable,
> specially when eggs bind to external libraries or when they are
> ported(hence the XEROX license, for instance). Ideally those should be
> an exception and chicken-install (or even chicken itself) should throw
> a warning.

I thought you *didn't* want to start a flamewar. 

> As an example of how complicated things are, this is from
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

A good reason to stay out of the business of legislating and policing this 
stuff.

Is this a problem in practice or just in theory?  The only qualm I have ever 
heard is about dynamically linking to GPL (not LGPL) eggs from non-GPL code, 
otherwise there doesn't seem to be a real issue.  That is pretty easy to avoid 
if you are concerned.

> Since eggs are just a chicken-install away, it is non-trivial to
> determine the legality of a project that uses several of these.

Other than GPL as mentioned, dynamic linking poses very few issues with license 
compatibility by design, so I am not convinced this is normally a problem.

You did have an interesting idea in re license info display.  Using the setup 
api, it should be pretty easy to write a program to display the license for 
each egg and recursively for its dependencies, since it's in the egg metadata.  
Do you want a program like this?

Jim