Mix of different licenses

opinkerfi / adagios

Adagios - Web Based Nagios Configuration

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

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Mix of different licenses #348

Closed matthieucan closed 10 years ago

matthieucan commented 10 years ago

If I understand correctly Adagios is licensed under AGPL-3, but some files inside seem to be under GPL-2 (rgrep Copyright). What should we do? I think licensing everything under AGPL-3 would be nice, or at least make the distinction between GPL-2 and AGPL-3 files in the root folder, for instance in COPYING. Do you also agree about licensing every file with the short mention at the top, letting other contributors add their name and the year?

tomas-edwardsson commented 10 years ago

Pull request #349 takes care of the erroneous headers.

I'm not a huge fan of putting names up in the files since git already does this fine, eg:

$ git shortlog -s -n -- adagios/urls.py
    13  Pall Sigurdsson
     7  Tomas Edwardsson
     1  Matthieu Caneill
     1  Nathan Bird

We have put the original author of the file in there though, but not a list.

tomas-edwardsson commented 10 years ago

@matthieucan thanks for reporting these issues. I've dealt with the headers in python files.

But I'm closing the issue since I don't think we need a COPYING file, the README.md clearly states Affero GPLv3 and we have attached the license as agpl-3.0.txt in the root of the source.

matthieucan commented 10 years ago

@tomas-edwardsson Thanks for taking care of this! The COPYING thing was for the case different licenses are in use in Adagios.

palli commented 10 years ago

Few thoughts...

Do we really need a copyright header at the top of every file? Why ?
agpl.txt in the root. But should we rename it to LICENSE to be explicit ?
I'm thinking it might be cool to maintain an AUTHORS file like we do with pynag, and group contributions by year. Any objections if i make one ?

matthieucan commented 10 years ago

Hi @palli, In other free software projects I invest myself, we use the header for 2 things:

to know who created the file, and who contributed to it, in which year(s),
to keep a single file licensed, if it was used somewhere else, possibly by other people.

I'm for the idea of renaming agpl.txt to either COPYING or LICENSE, that's the usual way to proceed, and it helps tools to recognize it automatically.

No objections for AUTHORS, that's cool indeed :)