Re: Proposal: change license to ZLIB license

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Egor Skriptunoff
<egor.skriptunoff@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 8:15 PM, Felipe Ferreira <felipefsdev@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Both ZLIB and BSD gives the end-user the same freedom for modifying the
>> software and use for whatever purpose. The only difference is how the
>> copyright notice must be reproduced: (1) for ZLIB, the copyright must be
>> retained in the source-code and (2) for BSD (Simplified BSD License), the
>> copyright must be retained in the source-code and ADDED to the binary form
>> and documentation.
>>
>
> Sorry for my (probably) stupid question, but why so much attention is paid
> to reproducing the copyright notice?
> Does it give some benefits to Lua authors?
> Why not using extremely permissive license like the following:
> https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to-but-it's-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-(wtfnmfpl-1.0)#fulltext

And that's fine for some example code, but many people (including the
Lua authors) have built careers out of distributing their intellectual
property freely. Without some sort of authorship, maintaining that
would be an absolute nightmare. On the consumer side, there has been
many times I have been able to trace back through code because the
license information at the top provides a link to the source and the
maintainer (notably JavaScript files as of late). If properly
maintained, the license can also be used to see when someone has
modified the functionality. The FreeBSD kernel is a good example of
being able to see who has made changes to kernel files. This would be
particularly useful if someone is trying to get help for something
that was modified by another author; it would be easy to see that the
file has been modified and pass that use back to the proper
maintainer.

I know someone would (will) argue that authorship information could
simply be maintained in code comments, but I would argue that
sometimes you just have to force people to do things. I have little
kids and asking nicely doesn't always work.

$0.25
Russ