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Licensing

The following information has not been set in stone yet. Your opinion matters! Please send mail to me and tell me your thoughts.

Licensing is always a difficult question, and a matter of many opinions. For Free-VMS, I don't really want to make any hard rules about this, except for some parts.

Generally, I find the following acceptable:

Licensing of kernel servers and other kernel stuff:

I'm haven't made up my mind completely on this, but I'm almost completely sure I want these to be licensed with the GNU General Public License.

Licensing of general routine libraries:

Any of the licenses shown below can be applied to these.

Licensing of general programs:

Any of the licenses shown below can be applied to these, except the GNU Library General Public License.

Copyright

Copyright should generally be assigned to the author of the routines and programs. There's no entity for the Free-VMS project to assign it to.
I'm not sure there will ever be such an entity... However, it wouldn't be too hard to simply refer to "the Free-VMS group"...

One way to put a copyright in the files that was suggested by Noah Paul <noahp@altavista.net> is a comment like the following (assume C syntax):

/*  	Copyright (C) yyyy by Your Name and the Free-VMS Group.  	To be distributed only under the License Of Choice.
Email comments to your e-mail address or subscribe to the  	Free-VMS mailing list, Free-VMS@lp.se.  */

Replace yyyy, Your Name, License Of Choice and your e-mail address with correct information.

There's also an excelent page at the Debian site.

Debian also uses a so called Social Contract that I'm quite tempted to copy, at least in parts, and apply on Free-VMS.