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bugaevc / wl-clipboard

Command-line copy/paste utilities for Wayland
GNU General Public License v3.0
1.62k stars 60 forks source link

some questions #95

Closed ghost closed 4 years ago

ghost commented 4 years ago
  1. why you have chosen GPL-v3 as the License?
  2. why you have used meson as the build system?

thanks.

bugaevc commented 4 years ago

Hi!

  1. I have chosen GNU GPL version 3 for this work because I want others to be able to use and enjoy it, freely, so, a proprietary license won't do. At the same time, I wanted to ensure that everyone benefits from any improvements made by anyone; a copyleft license such as GNU GPL requires them to publish their changes, so I can review them and merge them back if I like them.

    As a particular point, wl-clipboard is being used by users of a certain commercial Linux distribution developed by a certain U.S. megacorporation. I wouldn't want said megacorporation to fork wl-clipboard and ship their own, proprietary version.

    For even more reasoning why one would chose a free copyleft license (over proprietary licenses, and over permissive licenses), please see the philosophy section on GNU project website.

  2. I have chosen Meson, because it's the only Linux-native buildsystem that is not GNU Autotools. Let me expand: it's not complicated at all to run a compiler over a few source files, a simple Makefile or a shell script would do. What matters is that the build system is able to pick up the proper flags & paths & other settings for building the project the way that is native for the system, finding dependencies (such as by using pkg-config) and incorporating their flags and paths, and finally, properly installing the built project into the system. Of the buildsystems that are capable of this, Meson is the nicest and it provides good (or rather, great) defaults, and it just sucks the least in general.

    For more details on why Meson is awesome and why you would chose it over other buildsystems, I can direct you to these talks by its creator:

Also, I can point you to wl-clipboard-rs, whose author made different decisions on both fronts: it is permissively licensed, and builds with Cargo instead of Meson. To each their own, I guess.

Hope that helps.