Over the past five years I have been developing a point of sale system. This project includes literally dozens of files and shows the effects of multitudes of redesigns and rewrites, like geological layers on a revealed mountainside. In less poetic terms, it's full of artefacts and fossils that are no longer used, designs that have been written and overwritten as I've added and changed features while the system was live and in use.
I have promised this group for years that I would post this project for all to see (and possibly laugh at). My business is no more. I have no more reason to keep it proprietary. In fact, I've wanted to release this beast for years, but couldn't due to my due diligence to our investor. That's no longer necessary.
What I need advice on is exactly how to release this beast, and using what license. I'm pretty sure I'm going to use the GPL v2 license on the parts that I coded, but I'm open to being convinced of something else. I also am wavering between github and sourceforge.
I am very glad to be releasing this. Without wxPython and this group in particular, this project would never have been viable. Thank you all for your help, and to Robin for making this project even possible.
Chris.
I would encourage you to use the LGPL or Python license or similar for
the parts you most want to see re-used - especially any low-level
custom widgets, etc. The research group I work for tries to do
something like this (subject to the constraints of university tech
transfer officials); libraries are released as unrestricted
open-source (BSD-like), which means they can be and are used by
companies in proprietary software, while the applications are more
restricted (not redistributable). This allows us to retain a great
deal of control over the overall package, while making the underlying
tools as broadly useful as possible. (The same is also done by some
of the core wxPython developers, such as Andrea Gavana.) Of course it
limits what third-party code we can include, even in our purely
open-source libraries - anything GPL is strictly off-limits.
Personally, given the choice, I would probably just release everything
I wrote under as liberal a license as possible. There is always the
risk that some bottom-feeder could take your code, throw in a few
proprietary add-ons, and start selling it without releasing their
code. If this concern doesn't keep you awake at night, release it as
LGPL. Otherwise, GPL is certainly not a bad choice, but it will limit
how useful the code can be to the rest of the community.
-Nat
ยทยทยท
On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Christopher L. Spencer <cspencer@cinci.rr.com> wrote:
What I need advice on is exactly how to release this beast, and using what
license. I'm pretty sure I'm going to use the GPL v2 license on the parts
that I coded, but I'm open to being convinced of something else. I also am
wavering between github and sourceforge.