License?

[Midar]

I tried looking everywhere, but I cannot find the license of Watt-32 documented anywhere. What's the license?

[gvanem]

What's the license?

It's mentioned in the manual.txt. Not good enough?

[turol]

The "you may not sell this" makes it not FOSS. Picking one of the standard licenses would be better.

[gvanem]

Picking one of the standard licenses would be better.

Suggestions are welcome.

[turol]

BSD, MIT and Apache2 are the most common "permissive" licenses. They allow the library to be incorporated in closed-source programs, including commercial programs. They differ in things like patent grants and compatibility with copyleft licenses.

The alternative are copyleft LGPL, GPL and AGPL licenses. They require source code to be always provided under the same license, differing mostly in when source is required. They don't really forbid commercial usage bust most lawyers will not allow them.

[gvanem]

Since I forked this from https://github.com/sezero/watt32 (w/o any licence), it seems difficult now
to set a licence here on GitHub / Settings. But I'll look into this later.

[Midar]

Ah, thanks, I didn't see it in manual.txt and was looking for either a LICENSE or COPYING file or a README listing.

[Midar]

@turol It would be nice to have it open source indeed but I think this discussion needs to be opened on the repo this one forks.

[iainnicol]

Hi folks. I'm also interested in having a proper open source licence on Watt-32. My recent background is I've been helping a relicensing effort for Open Watcom. I came across Watt-32 because a version of Watt-32 is distributed with Open Watcom.

To answer an earlier question, setting a licence in GitHub is really straightforward: you create a file called LICENSE or COPYING, either with no extension, or .txt or .md (for markdown). If the contents of that file is a standard open source licence, GitHub will detect that, and label the repository appropriately. The fact that this GitHub repo was forked from sezero's is mostly unimportant.

However, whilst @gvanem is obviously the primary author of Watt-32, they're not the only author. Watt-32 is of course derived from Erick Engelke's WATTCP. Unless all of Erick's copyrightable code has been written (which is possible but I'm guessing incredibly unlikely), then Erick's permission is required.

However, it transpires that Erick release a later version of WATTCP under the LGPL. I've just emailed him, asking if (a) he'd backdate the open source licence, so that Watt-32 can benefit, and (b) double check whether LGPL remains the preference, or whether he and Gisle would prefer a permissive licence.

If Ericke and Gisle can agree on a permissive licence, that's most of the work. However, there are a handful of other contributors over the years, mentioned in the thanks file or in the changelog. More recently, there are other contributors to the git repo, for example including sezero again. It would be Good to seek permission from these other contributors, at least where their contribution was more than about 15 lines of code. I can help with this, just like I have with Open Watcom.

@Midar could you kindly reopen this issue?

[iainnicol]

Oh wow! I got a very quick, positive response from Erick:

It's been more than 30 years since I started that project. A lot has happened since in the free software world and I haven't kept track.

Essentially: I'm open to any free license for the software and would be compatible with the goals we all had.

I remember liking BSD style license, it seems the most open to me. You are not encumbered by anything except you cannot sue the originator!

Gisle, if you're happy to, I think we should go for the MIT licence. As I replied to Erick, the MIT license is identical in spirit, but has two minor advantages: (a) slightly more explicit in granting certain permissions, (b) popularity - everybody seems to use it, so if you want a permissive licence, it's hard to go wrong.

[gvanem]

That good new indeed. Will do.
And a long time since Erick ushered a work.

[jwt27]

Some of the headers are copied/adapted from BSD, and retain the original copyright notice. I'm not an expert on this, but it seems that would complicate things a bit?

[iainnicol]

Some of the headers are copied/adapted from BSD, and retain the original copyright notice. I'm not an expert on this, but it seems that would complicate things a bit?

Thank you for raising this. However it's not a big problem 🙂. BSD and MIT are both permissive licences, and moreover they are are compatible.

Essentially, for attribution, you just have to include both licenses with the binary, instead of one. Either way, you need to include the two different copyright lines.

If people feel strongly, we can go back to Erick and Geoffrey, but unless you do, I don't :-p.

Either way, it was a good spot.

It made me realise due to the age, the BSD files use the Four Clause BSD license, with the advertising clause. We can delete that slightly annoying clause, because Berkeley deleted that clause in 1999.

[Midar]

We can delete that slightly annoying clause, because Berkeley deleted that clause in 1999.

That’s not how licenses work.