[Incubator] triple licensing, js file license references

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl wrote:
> Hi developers,
> there have been some discussions regarding licensing. What do you think of
> this one, I stumbled accross on Mozilla when checking out the calendar:
> 
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/index.html
> 
> "Sunbird is licensed under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, allowing use
> of the files under the terms of any one of the Mozilla Public License,
> version 1.1 (MPL), the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later
> (GPL), or the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later
> (LGPL)."
> 
> This would finally take care of people pestering us whether they are
> allowed to bind, use, include, package, whatever Mapbender into their
> proprietary applications. We get this kind of request every two weeks and
> every time its a hassle finding out whether or not and how to.
> 
> Comments?

Arnulf,

It is certainly possible for you to multi-license as long as one of the
available licenses is OSI approved.  Are you asking if you ought to
multi-license?  I don't especially encourage it myself unless you have
a particular goal you are trying to encourage.  There is also the issue
of getting permission to relicense from all copyright holders if you wanted
to change things.

> Hi InCom,
> another quetion is how to references the license in JavaScript files. Some
> of them are so short that even the short license reference is three times
> larger than the code itself. My favorite is this one:
> https://mapbender.osgeo.org/source/browse/*checkout*/mapbender/trunk/mapbender/http/javascripts/mod_treeConf.js?rev=38
 >
> 
> In most short js files we therfore currently don't have any reference to
> the GPL. Is that problematic?

I think something like this from GRASS is pretty much the minimum
you should do.

* COPYRIGHT:    (C) 2001 by the GRASS Development Team
*
*               This program is free software under the GNU General Public
*   	    	License (>=v2). Read the file COPYING that comes with GRASS
*   	    	for details.

Rich, do you have a suggestion for a proper copyright/license header?

I see that FDO (loosely part of MapGuide OS) uses the following header:

/*
*
* Copyright (C) 2004-2005  Autodesk, Inc.
*
* This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser
* General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.
*
* This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
* Lesser General Public License for more details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
* License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301  USA
*
*/

I can see why this might be a bit wordy for a tiny javascript file.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org