Re: Lua Cookbook

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Axel Kittenberger once stated:
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 11:11 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Recipie #1
> > Pretty Print The Contents Of A Table (non-recursive)
> >        Author:  Sean Conner
> >        Website: http://example.net/lua/table/show.lua
> >        License: LGPL
> 
> Why did you now throw in LGPL? I fully felt with you all when the
> discussion above drifted off copyright-law-bashing in general etc.
> really not kin about it. But I've seen other places, where at the end
> of a hugh construction, they suddendly discovered they couldn't use
> it, because they didnt care a second about license. So not to spawn
> this discussion again, has anybody any strong objections against the
> cookbook being in CC-BY 3.0? This allows most easy use of the book for
> everything for every purpose.

  I'm not sure how the Creative Commons licenses will mix with source code.
CC was created in response to overlong copyrights as a way to signal that
intellectual property creators are okay with certain types of uses but I've
never seen any Creative Commons license used with soure code (with manuals,
yes, but not with actual source code).  At the very least, the GNU, MIT and
BSD licenses have a strong legal basis and the usages and restrictions are
known.  The CC licenses per software hasn't been tested at all and thus may
be more of an issue than code licensed under a more traditional open source
software license.  In fact, the page to choose a Creative Commons license
[1] doesn't even *have* a section for source code; the only option available
is "other".

  I threw in the license field to show that it would be easy to indicate the
preferred license of the author of that particular piece of code, as well as
the author field, and a field for the location of where you can obtain the
code over the net [2].  Different authors have different reasons for using
the various open source licenses they use [3][4].  By including a license
for each bit of code, each author can use a license they feel comfortable
using, the code gets out and shows how to use Lua.  And if a snippit of code
doesn't fit their project, they at least have a blueprint showing how to go
about writing the code such that it will fit into their project.

  That's it.

  -spc

[1]	http://creativecommons.org/choose/

[2]	The URL I gave is an example, in case it isn't clear

[3]	I like the GPL.  I like the ability to get the source code to the
	programs I use so I can fix bugs and maybe add functionality to fix
	a really oddball, one-off, use case.  And I would like to extend
	that functionality to people who programs I write.

[4]	In my example, the LGPL still allows use of the code in proprietary
	codebases without infecting the rest of the codebase with the GPL. 
	But it does mean any changes made to the LGPLed code need to be
	released, and thus any improvements made are made available to all.

	I'm not intending this to start a licensing discussion; it just an
	example of why I did what I did.