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I'm not a legal expert but my understanding is that by default, unlicensed code cannot legally be redistributed and used by others. Thats makes sense because the purpose of a license is to define the exact terms under which something can be distributed and used.
If you modify existing moOde code which is licensed under GPLv3 then your modifications fall under the terms of that license. If you create new code then as the Copyright owner of that code you must assign a license that states how that code can be used by others. If you want it to be freely used and redistributed by others then licenses such as GPLv3, MIT and others would allow that.
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https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/ is a useful summary of the no-license situation and the homepage itself (choosealicense.com) is essentially a flowchart for choosing a license.
Regards,
Kent
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10-04-2022, 01:52 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-04-2022, 01:56 PM by Nutul.)
(10-04-2022, 12:00 PM)TheOldPresbyope Wrote: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/ is a useful summary of the no-license situation and the homepage itself (choosealicense.com) is essentially a flowchart for choosing a license.
Regards,
Kent
That's a good starting point; although I do not see fit for my use case. Anyway, in your opinion, does a copyright disclaimer at the beginning of the file (like moOde has plenty of) do the job? I guess yes. Then the whole-project-license does the rest.
Cheers, Al.
P.S.
@ Tim Curtis
how did you proceed when you added:
1. the wide screensaver layout? (very little code, lots of CSS)
2. the screensaver clock? (almost no CSS, but slightly more code)
did you add a licence? did you create new files, or just extend existing ones? If do, I could do the very same, uh?
Again, I am not trying to avoid the license thing... It's just I usually get mad at stupid things.
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Copyright is completely separate from licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
Copyright which is automatically granted to the creator/owner of "something" gives the creator/owner the exclusive legal right to determine how the "thing" is to be used by others including not allowing any use of the "thing".
The License is what the Copyright holder assigns to the "thing" to specifies exactly how the "thing" is to be used. Without a License a Copyrighted "thing" by default cannot be used by others.
The License for moOde sources is GPLv3. It stipulates that the sources can be freely modified, the modifications automatically inherit the GPLv3 License and that those modifications must be made available to anyone that wants them.
The original source code for moOde was created by the Tsunamp project (later to become Rune and Volumio). This source code was Licensed under GPLv3 and so all the modifications made by the Moode project to those original sources are also GPLv3 by inheritance. For all the new files that I added I chose to also license them under GPLv3. There are other source files used in the moOde project whose authors used other licenses for example MIT but those licenses are all Open Source compatible.
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(10-04-2022, 03:27 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: The original source code for moOde was created by the Tsunamp project (later to become Rune and Volumio). This source code was Licensed under GPLv3 and so all the modifications made by the Moode project to those original sources are also GPLv3 by inheritance. For all the new files that I added I chose to also license them under GPLv3. There are other source files used in the moOde project whose authors used other licenses for example MIT but those licenses are all Open Source compatible.
I presume you are here referring to Camilla DSP, miniDLNA, SpotifyConnect, Shairplay and the like; which are indeed 3-rd party projects that live well also outside moOde, not just a script, or a couple of cycles and event handlers, that are actually a small extension in boot/UI functionality.
Anyway, since it's cleaner to have the OSK in its own files (it's easy to include it at PHP level), I may also decide to licence those files under the GPLv3...
How do I proceed, then? Shall I include a README document, for instance, where I state that the OSK code falls into the GPLv3 constraints?
Thanks
Cheers, A.
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It can be one file for example thumb-gen.php or trx-control.php which I created or mpdconf-merge.py which @ bitlab created or it can be a whole other complete component like Shairport-sync or MPD which contain 100's of files.
The amount of code does not matter. What matters is that the creato/owner of the code holds the Copyright and is responsible for licensing the code.
Have a look at the program comment headers in the files I just mentioned and in some of the original source files for example playerlib.js. You will see the Copyright notice(s) and the License statement.
If you decide to License your OSK code under GPLv3 then update your Git repo and add a LICENSE file and then edit the source files and add a program comment header that mimics one of moOde's program headers and you will be all set.
I know it seems very formal but it's absolutely required if you are going to do Free Open Source Software.
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(10-04-2022, 04:50 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: I know it seems very formal but it's absolutely required if you are going to do Free Open Source Software.
Yep, I'll do so, thank you.
Cheers, Al.
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(10-04-2022, 07:01 PM)Nutul Wrote: (10-04-2022, 04:50 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: I know it seems very formal but it's absolutely required if you are going to do Free Open Source Software.
Yep, I'll do so, thank you.
Cheers, Al.
One more thing. If you derived the OSK code from someone else's code make sure their code is Licensed and that the License permits modifying and freely redistributing the modified code.
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(10-04-2022, 07:26 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: (10-04-2022, 07:01 PM)Nutul Wrote: (10-04-2022, 04:50 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: I know it seems very formal but it's absolutely required if you are going to do Free Open Source Software.
Yep, I'll do so, thank you.
Cheers, Al.
One more thing. If you derived the OSK code from someone else's code make sure their code is Licensed and that the License permits modifying and freely redistributing the modified code.
the OSK has been written from scratch by myself.
Al.
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(10-03-2022, 03:20 PM)Tim Curtis Wrote: I'm in the process of doing the release administration for 8.2.1 and so that ship has already sailed but maybe for next release it can be considered. Off the top of my head monitoring of USB mounts and LED indicators seems unnecessary.
I'm also trying to get to a point where all code is managed via Github processes. This is to help streamline our project management and administration.
Did you happen to put the code in a Git repo and is there a license attached?
Tim,
in accordance with your requirements, I've just created my Github repo here: https://github.com/homo-metallicus/moOde-mountstatus
It's experimental stuff and I'm not a professional developer so take it for what it is.
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