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On 8/14/2011 8:05 PM, Lars Doelle wrote:
Kein-Hong,But if you are thinking to have some claim over any kind of _mechanism_, then I think there are going to be *big* issues...[snip] Now having a strong GPL background, i would not license my work under MIT/X11 and wonder, if this would be considered a violation of habits, thus making a publication partically useless. Could anyone please tell me if there's a common position here on this matter.Discussing mechanisms and talking about code with GPL? That's an even bigger problem, a 30-ton brontosaurus. Of course I have uses for GPL too, but I have huge reservations about what you are doing.To make myself clear here, it is not about extensions of the Lua core, but about user's side material. As I put a different load onto Lua, I necessarily touch Lua's expressive limits, but i do take the purity of the language very serious. I won't even consider the project, if it were not so. Thus i might stumble over limits and extensions, that would make life easier in this cases, along the way, but the package would do without any. If i would think extending the machinery would be truly necessary, i would release a patch under MIT, this is clear. The problem i sense is the other way round, i.e. a possible tendency on user space contributions being only or preferable accepted only under Lua's license itself by a community otherwise interested into bringing Lua forward. That's my concern and my question.
To clarify, here's my reasoning: IIRC, there was a discussion of mechanisms to do something, perhaps efficiently. Maybe a proposal to extend Lua. I'm all for such things, may they rise or fall on their merits.
But developers concoct mechanisms all the time to solve problems and make their app work. Thus, if your sample code do not expose any bits of your under-wraps application, then it is merely something that could have been coded by "a person of sufficient skill in the art". Very rarely are mechanisms so novel that they can claim to be invented. I can tell a judge that I insist on the sole right to this kind of algorithm -- but I'll get roasted.
A mechanism doing something generic could have been done by anyone. In the same vein, I use the MIT license for libraries when I think someone else would have done something quite similar -- it's really nothing special, just grunt work.
Now, your application is the unique thing that you should protect according to the license of your choice. It is the larger body of work that should be GPLed. Similarly, a processor datasheet tells you how to initialize a processor. Anyone can code something with that information. But I cannot copy a BIOS and violate its copyright.
So forgive some of us for being critical about some things. I was finding the proceedings a little strange and spoke up...
IMHO, perhaps you need to pick when to copyright and when not to bother, especially when you are sharing stuff in a public forum. Granted, the landscape of copyright is terribly broken, but I do hope we can choose to avoid following certain non-human friendly examples set by large corporations.
-- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia