license clarification

[artfwo]

so what's the license for norns and related code?

[tehn]

well, @catfact and i decided aleph's code would be public domain

i'm up for suggestions and i won't have time to do a deep comparison right away

[artfwo]

it also depends on which third-party code is used in norns and their licenses.

[catfact]

off the top of my head, only 3rd party code i can think of is the lua source

weirdly, there's no license file in their github (!)

they declare an MIT-ish license here: https://www.lua.org/license.html

[tehn]

we did GPL for teletype. any objections or suggestions?

https://github.com/monome/teletype/blob/master/LICENSE

[artfwo]

the code for ugens uses SC3 (GPL) headers, so they have to be GPL3. anything else could be covered by other license or PD.

GPL will explicitly restrict using the code in proprietary projects; MIT will allow that as long as the credit/copyright notice is preserved.

[catfact]

i'm pretty sure we could find ways to use a more permissive / noninfectious license for some components if we really wanted to. but i'm generally fine with GPL3.

for the components that really do rely on GPL stuff (like actual SC classes) then its of course ethical to use GPL3.

SoftCutHead core logic isn't one of those, in my opinion. it would be equally useful in a max or pd external. it would also be easy to refactor into a library that's distributed separately and lightly wrapped for the ugen.

[tehn]

gpl3 for now, then.