Re: Licensing questions for my Rails project
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:04:19AM -0400, Richard Hurt wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I am in the process of building my first Rails application
> (Gradesheet[1]) and would like a little advice on assigning a license.
> Even though most Rails projects are MIT licensed the chosen license for
> this application is GPL-2, which I think covers my needs pretty well.
> The reason I'm asking this list is that I want to, one day, package this
> application up for use in Debian and I want to make sure everything goes
> as smoothly as possible.
>
> My question is what is the best way to apply this license to my project?
> I know that I could copy the GPL-2 header into each of my files, but that
> is very repetitive and wasteful of storage and screen space. My thought
> was just to put a license section in the README.rdoc or make a
> LICENSE.rdoc file that says something like "this project is licensed
> under GPL-2, except otherwise explicitly noted." Would that satisfy the
> Debian packaging requirements? If not, what do I have to do?
Personally, I just put the full GPL header in all my source files; disk is
cheap, it compresses well, and your editor should be able to fold it away so
you don't have to look at it. If you're philosophically opposed to doing
that, a brief header with the statement that the file is GPL and a pointer
to LICENSE.rdoc should definitely be in every file.
Then, LICENSE.rdoc should contain a full audit of every source file in the
package, with copyright holders and dates for each file, since you're not
putting that into each file individually any more. The advantage of this is
that if you format it right, you can very easily shift it to
debian/copyright, and kill multiple birds with a single, well-aimed
projectile.
- Matt
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