[Gambas-user] Licensing problems in Gambas

[Benoît Minisini]

> 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.

It is difficult to determine the attribution of each page. By reading the page 
history, you can know all users that modified something on a specific page. 
But sometimes it is an error, so you cannot automate the process.

I suggest the following:

- Using the GNU FDL, as it is used by Wikipedia. 

- All users having a write access to the wiki will be considered as an author.

Now I think all wiki users should tell if he agrees with the license. Or maybe 
should we fix a date in the future, and if nobody explicitely disagrees until 
that date, we apply the license. Because I'm not sure that all wiki users do 
modify it.

> 
> 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.
> 

Daniel Vostanikian wrote it, Laurent Carlier and I did some little changes. 
But personnally I don't want to manage a non GPL package, I don't use firebird 
at all, and I don't have time. So firebird users are welcome to deal with that 
problem!

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini