[SVN] Licensing for Bundles?

[Allan Odgaard]

On May 13, 2005, at 20:33, David Glasser wrote:

> I don't particularly care too much about this, but seeing as you are a
> commercial enterprise and such you might want to look into the
> appropriate way of dealing with this -- probably by asking everyone
> with SVN access to agree to some clause about giving MacroMates the
> right to redistribute anything you put there, and making us promise
> that what we give is ours to redistribute.  Actually adding a formal
> "license" block to the bundles (inside the plist or whatever) wouldn't
> necessarily suck either.

Yes, this has actually been briefly discussed earlier, though mainly  
wrt including stuff not created by the current contributors, which is  
probably where problems could arise, e.g. including a binary of some  
program where the license of that binary only allows redistribution  
in a certain form.

I'd prefer just to have everything under one license, and allow  
exceptions (for when including stuff already under another license).  
So I propose adding license.txt to the root of the repository putting  
everything (not explicitly stated to fall under another license)  
under this copyright:

     Copyright (c) 2004-2005 MacroMates

     Permission to copy, use, modify, sell and distribute this  
software is
     granted. This software is provided "as is" without express or  
implied
     warranty, and with no claim as to its suitability for any purpose.

I would like to assign the copyright to this collective group, but I  
don't know what name that should be under. Maybe one needs to  
register an organization to be able to do such a thing?

Another option is to put everything in the repository in the public  
domain, that means no-one has any copyright on the stuff AFAIK (but  
IANAL).

I'm also open to people adding stuff with their own copyright, as  
long as they grant me/MacroMates the right to “copy, use, modify,  
sell and distribute” the contributions. But the problem with  
individual copyrights is that others may later make modifications to  
a contribution.