Licensing.

[taylskid]

Should we go ahead and choose a licence for Hatter? Before possible forks by people outside of LPMC (optimism never killed anyone)

I'm leaning towards the MIT license.

[expez]

I would prefer GPL. Don't want to give anyone the ability to fork and continue without contributing back. I also like the viral nature of the GPL; that really seems to piss certain people off.

[taylskid]

I would like to (after some deliberation on IRC) propose the Two-Clause BSD license.

[jfredett]

For the moment, I recommend the following: Don't license it, All rights remain reserved to the LPMC. We develop in the open, and when it comes time to license it, we'll make an informed decision then.

As for License choice, I'll note (as I did in IRC) -- the GPL is not a viral license, even with the Afferro clause it's still not viral except in a very limited way. The best way to encourage contribution is to apply a dual license, GPL/MIT, and to specify that the MIT license is for non-commercial use only (there are variants of the MIT that do this by nature), and that for commercial use the GPL is applied. Typically a non-commercial user will be willing to return contributions anyway, and commercial users are required to.

In a more general sense, it's the opinion of the LPMC as an organization that licensure is up to the project leader of the project (which in this case is me). By virtue of the project leader being the maintainer, in a 'real' open source project, the contributors do not decide the license. Since this is not exactly a 'normal' OSS project, I'm happy to hear arguments for either license. I recommend, therefore, the following -- between now and when I think we have an actual, usable 'thing', we have each of you research your License of choice and make an argument for it, I'll weigh the arguments objectively, and make a decision then.

Sound good?

[taylskid]

Deal.