[osmosis-dev] Licence ...

[Brett Henderson]

I hate to bring this topic up because I don't know if I have the 
necessary patience for it :-)

Osmosis is currently GPL3.  At one point I was going to use GPL2 or 
later but the use of the Apache bzip2 implementation precludes that.

The number of authors is fairly low at the moment so there is still a 
chance to change the licence.

At this point I'm wishing I'd just released it as public domain in the 
first place.  I don't intend to make money from it, I don't care what 
people do with it, and the recent discussions on legal-talk have 
convinced me that any gains that a copyleft licence might achieve are 
dwarfed by the problems that licence compatibility causes.  The use of 
bzip2 libraries has already forced my hand in one direction, and it's 
likely to only get worse.  Osmosis is a piece of plumbing that is most 
useful if it can be used anywhere.

My motivation for creating osmosis in the first place was simply that my 
day job no longer had a technical component and I wanted a hobby 
software project to tinker with.  It quickly grew into a bigger time 
sink than I originally planned but my reasons for involvement are still 
that it is a hobby.  I get more satisfaction out of seeing people using 
something I've built than I do out of any recognition for being the 
author.  At this point my time is becoming more limited so I see my role 
becoming less central but I'd like to make sure that everything 
including the licence status is robust before I drop anything.

So, what are people's thoughts?  There are approximately half a dozen 
contributors so far who I can mail separately if required (or name them 
on this list, not sure what the etiquette is here).  With one exception 
(initial 0.6 support) most patches have been fairly self contained and 
could be replaceable if required.  If there's no major arguments I'll 
send the existing authors an email over the next few days asking 
permission to release all software as public domain.  If that goes 
smoothly then the existing licence text can be removed and replaced with 
a public domain dedication statement of some kind.

Brett