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Closed 10 years ago.
I've got had concerns of many licenses I've seen having nothing preventing other developers from taking code and claiming it as theirs. A few I've looked at included MIT and CPAL licenses. What licenses could offer some peace of mind in that regard?
How about the Apache 2.0 license:
You must retain, in the Source form of
any Derivative Works that You
distribute, all copyright, patent,
trademark, and attribution notices
from the Source form of the Work,
excluding those notices that do not
pertain to any part of the Derivative
Works; and
But I think you are worrying too much. Most users of FOSS code will happily retain attributions, license or no, and do you really have the financial resources to pursue those few who don't?
I recommend all software be licensed under the Poetic License:
(c) <year> <name>
This work ‘as-is’ we provide.
No warranty express or implied.
We’ve done our best,
to debug and test.
Liability for damages denied.
Permission is granted hereby,
to copy, share, and modify.
Use as is fit,
free or for profit.
These rights, on this notice, rely.
It is essentially the MIT license as a limerick. However, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you want. As a joke answer, I community wiki-ed it so people wouldn't think I was rep-whoring.
But I, personally, will be using the Poetic license on as much software as I can justify to myself.
The BSD license has an attribution clause in it:
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
I like the BSD license because it's short, straight forward, and easy to comprehend.
I would compare it with the Apache 2.0 License that Neil suggested and see which one better meets your needs.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm developing an application and am thinking about releasing it open source.
Is it good choice to open source it, even though it's not a developer API library, but an end user app?
When is it a good time to release the source code? Should I start the project open source from the very beginning or wait until it's v1.0?
If the source code is GPL, how do you prevent someone from grabbing it and illegally releasing a proprietary closed source application? In practice, how can this violation of copyright law be spotted and is the law enforceable?
This is all inherently subjective, of course...
Yes. There are many open source end user applications. Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, Open Office, and many many (other) GNOME and KDE apps, for example.
You definitely don't need to wait until v1.0, though it might be good to wait until you've got some early proof of concept code to "announce" the project. If you announce an empty code repository you'r unlikely to get contributors, and it may be hard to drum up enthusiasm later.
Spotting a GPL violation of an app is probably easier than spotting a GPL violation of a library, on average.
If the code is GPL and you have evidence (or strong suspicions) that the GPL was violated you could try contacting gpl-violations.org or the FSF.
Here are my opinions:
1 - Yes. It can be a portfolio, an example app for others, anything... IMHO, it doesn't matter if it's not a dev-focused project.
2 - Since the beginning. One great thing about these open-sources repositories is that it holds the source code. And there, you can but some ideas about the direction of the project, maybe even discuss it with other users / developers.
3 - Thats tough. I guess you can't, but I'm not sure.
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Closed 10 years ago.
How much better would commercial OCR software be compared to the stuff that's available online for free?
More specifically: Reading text in pictures (things like book covers etc...)
I work with OCR quite a lot and can definitely vouch that the commercial offerings are much better than what you can find out there for free. Yes, you can make a free one 'work', but it will take a lot of effort for sub-optimal results.
I recommend finding a product that uses the ABBYY FineReader : It does a great job with little configuration.
You may want to consider whether you need to use an SDK provided by the OCR supplier or an end-user application. The SDK will provide position details, etc of what it finds and offer a lot more in-depth control, but will be more expensive. The end-user package will basically just read everything it finds, but you may be able to set it to automatic or control it rudimentally and it might be good enough for what you're trying to do, and may be a lot cheaper.
Get a trial version and give it a go!
Google's ocropus is free opensource and one of the best
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Closed 10 years ago.
This is the first time I'm creating an open-source project, and I've decided (based on this question) to host it on Google Code. Now, I'm asked which of several open-source licenses I'd like to use. I'm not interested in digging into them to figure them out, so:
Which one should I pick?
From what I understand, BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses all allow another person/company to use the source code in a closed-source, commercial project, as long as they provide acknowledgement. GPL requires that any project using the code will also be released as GPL. GPL will reduce the number of people who can legally use your code, but it helps to keep improvements in the public. Those are the most important differences in my opinion. Your opinion determines which one is best for your project.
(Edit: You really should read through the licenses, though, in case "what I understand" is incorrect.)
Assign each one to a number on a dice and give it a roll. If you don't want to take the time to read each one and decide for yourself which one fits you best, there's really no difference between rolling a dice and using the one someone suggests for you.
Of course the most important consideration is to choose a license that is compatible with your project goals and philosophy. If your software is intended to be used in conjunction with some other open source software, prefer to use the same license if possible, or at least a compatible license. If you do not wish your code to be used in non-free software without your permission, prefer GPLv3 (or GPLv2). If you want your code used as widely as possible, even allowing others to distribute it under a different or closed license, prefer Apache v2 (or MIT or new BSD).
A summary of open source licenses can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licences. Read the Wikipedia article on any license of interest to get more details. Once you have tentatively chosen one, read the license itself to ensure that there are not any surprises. If there is some part you are not comfortable with, pick a different one.
You should really read about each licence and select the one that suits the most. Read and read again, to understand well. There is no other easy way to select a licence.
Take a look at this
It's contains pretty much every thing about open source licenses
This question is one which is likely to result in numerous differing and quite heated answers from various camps. Some believe that the BSD / MIT license is the best way to go, others believe that the GPL is the best license.
Suffice to say it really depends on what the goals of the project are and how you feel personally about the restrictions or lack of restrictions that the license imposes on third parties.
Only you can really answer this question.
If you forced me into an answer I would most likely choose the BSD license.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I know of osTicket, are there any other more compelling help ticket systems?
My company wants to use one and I am researching them now.
I forgot to mention, I will need to install it on our servers...so SaaS (software as a service) doesn't work.
There is good information on Wikipedia at
Comparison of Issue Tracking Systems
Personally, I'm fond of Trac, which has the capability of integrating with subversion, so when you check in a file, if you say something like...
$ svn ci -m "automatically fix any broken dates in the input. fixes #87"
....then Trac will automatically add this comment and close bug #87 for you.
"Best" helpdesk system is very subjective, of course, but I recommend Request Tracker (aka RT).
It has a default workflow built in, but is easily configured for alternate workflows using the "Scrips" and templates. Very extensible if you want.
OTRS, Cerberus
I like eTicket Support, is very simple to use and install.
It absolutely depens on what your goals are. The Bugzilla and Trac systems mentioned are nice but geared towards bug tracking, which is just very different from a tool you'd want to use in a helpdesk-type setup where end users would raise incidents.
If the latter is what you are looking for I'd suggest you take a look at OTRS which is a very capable trouble ticketing system. It also has ITSM extensions, which makes it able to support ITIL processes if you need to.
I recommend OTRS, its very easily customizable, and we also use it for hundreds of employees (University).
Howabout Bugzilla. Open source and what Mozilla uses.
Here are a couple that look pretty decent:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/smallhd/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/helpdeskcsharp/
TRAC. Open source, Python-based
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Closed 9 years ago.
Having witnessed in various open source projects, in which I have been involved, several more or less significant totally anonymous contributions, I am wondering what could be the possible rationale behind such anonymous contributions?
Occasionally, there are contributors who quite obviously prefer to remain completely anonymous - i.e. by just posting to a mailing list using an obvious nick name for months (whereas everyone else would use their real name), or sometimes even by submitting completely anonymous patches to trackers on sourceforge, where there wasn't even the slightest comment about the origins/authors, usually just a license header or a header stating that the code in question were to be released into the public domain.
Often, the code in question was obviously written by fairly competent programmers/developers or even software engineers, who presumably do code for a living.
I am wondering:
What's the motivation behind such contributions?
Have you previously witnessed such and similar instances in open source projects?
Have you, yourself possibly contributed to an open source project in such a fashion?
If so, why?
Can you provide any other insight into this?
After having read another question here on SO, and also after having read two related discussions (at slashdot and perlmonks) about potential work-contract related issues when contributing to open source projects, I am wondering whether some contributors could possibly prefer to remain completely anonymous due to their contract requirements, in order to avoid potential legal issues.
Thanks
I can think of several reasons:
some people simply value privacy - I know that I usually do not post on most forums with my name - SO is the exception for me (and even here it was only after a couple months);
many programmers work at places where part of the employment agreement is that any code you write (whether on company time or not) belongs to the employer. Whether or not these agreements might apply to the submissions, the programmer may be wanting to avoid 'tainting' the submission or may want to avoid going through the bureaucratic hoops to get permission from the employer;
the submitter may not want to be contacted for support;
the submitter may not be particularly proud of the code (rightly or wrongly);
I own two reasonably popular open source projects. I have accepted such contributions. The rationale is simple. They are using the project and want a problem resolved or feature implements sooner rather than later.
The contribution benefits them!
The most likely reason I can think of is they have some sort of contractual binding preventing them from contributing openly, such as working for a large software corporation that views open source projects as a potential liability. Or they just don't want to be bothered with people asking for more information or more support.