Re: Lilypond & Halfdiminished/Diminished symbols.

[David Kastrup]

David Nalesnik <address@hidden> writes:

>> On 2018-08-07 04:03, David Kastrup wrote:
>> >
>> > A license, as opposed to relying on people to stay nice, also protects
>> > you against such worst case scenarios.
>> >
>> > Also many (but not necessarily all) code pieces from David may be
>> > substantially derived from LilyPond code code licensed under the GPL.
>> > In that case, the derived code cannot be licensed under different
>> > conditions without being, in turn, in violation of the code it made use
>> > of.
>
> Good grief :( I selected the MIT license because it's very common, and
> in the spirit of, as you write, "feel free to use it, I don't care."

For original code you don't want to bother with in any manner (in
particularly not suing over), it's a good choice.  But it makes it
easier for people to stay in compliance if you actually add the license
headers to the files.

As I said: most of our interactions are governed by us being nice
reasonable people that feel they are part of a community.  In
particular, there are lots of exchanges posting sample code without ever
bothering to mention licensing.  Strictly speaking, that puts them under
default copyright, not permitting copying and modification outside of
personal use.

Who is going to sue?  Within this kind of semi-personal communication,
someone feeling pissed off.  Taking code and redistributing as part of a
proprietary program: that may annoy some people.  Taking code and
redistributing under the MIT license: unlikely.  But then someone else
may take the code and redistribute as part of a proprietary program.

Licensing for most programmers is an annoying mess to think about, but
there are people whose profession is thinking about that annoying mess
and copyright does not always stay with the people you interacted with
originally since it is a transferable assets, and not all asset
transfers are voluntary (for example, bankruptcy and death usually
involve transfer of assets).

Licenses are the hard underpinnings of what originally is (and some
think should be) just nice people interacting with one another.  The GPL
and the GNU project were born basically when RMS fell flat on his face
regarding Gosling Emacs and nice people staying nice.

Now it seems nobody understood my motivation of contradicting Mason who
stated that "software freedom" enabled modifying and using what you
posted, and my pedantry caused me to contradict him because in that
particular case it was first the implied permission of your reply with
code enabling personal use, and the freedoms granted by your GitHub
license on the referenced code which would have permitted modification
and redistributing _if_ the conditions of the MIT license had been met,
which they hadn't.  So basically he relied on you being a nice guy.

And that is what most interactions on the list actually boil down to.
The licenses are the hard underpinnings, but most of the time we are
actually walking on thin air.  It's just that should we fall, usually
the hard underpinnings are close enough that it doesn't matter.

So why talk about it at all?

Because I am a pedant.  Sometimes I just like to dissect things and see
what is actually involved.

Sorry for annoying anybody.

-- 
David Kastrup