[Gambas-user] Licensing problems in Gambas

[Rob]

On Thursday 19 November 2009 07:09 am, Benoît Minisini wrote:
> There are two licensing problems in Gambas that must be solved.
> 1) The first one should not be difficult: we must find a license for the
> gambas wiki documentation that makes it free. I need suggestions...

Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, and of course there are the various Creative 
Commons licenses that are better suited to documentation than programs.

I guess the next question is whether everyone who's contributed to the wiki 
will go for whichever license you pick; I'm certainly okay with the GFDL or 
CC-BY-SA, but I have no idea how other people would feel.  

I thought I had some text in the old Wiki on the editor page that required 
the user to submit their entries under some free license, but that page 
wasn't included in the static dumps for obvious reasons and I can't find 
the old tarballs of our TWiki installation that I made after the spammers 
attacked.  At any rate, I don't see anything like that in the current 
Wiki's editor.

> 2) The bad problem: gb.db.firebird uses two sources files from
>  www.ibpp.org whose license (the Borland Interbase Public License) is
>  not compatible with the GPL. This point was raised by Kelly Hopkins,
>  the maintainer of the gnu.org free software directory. I'm afraid
>  Gambas will have to lose firebird support, but maybe we should ask
>  www.ibpp.org about that. I need help there too!

Who wrote gb.db.firebird?  Maybe they could maintain it as a separate 
package, though I guess whichever Gambas headers they built against would 
have to be relicensed as LGPL in that case.  I didn't know anyone used 
firebird anymore.

Rob