"A Mentoring Course on Smalltalk" Code License

I emailed Andres, the author, and he said "the code didn't have a license because I meant to put no restrictions on it...  The MIT license is fine with me.  In fact, I released the Hash Analysis Tool and Assessments under the MIT license already."

Then he asked a great question: "Let me know what you need and I'll put it in.  Or do you need that the book explicitly states the code mentioned therein is MIT?"

I've been contacting many people to declare code as MIT.  What "proof" is considered acceptable?  I've been announcing it on the mailing list, so anyone could search back, contact me, and I could send them the email I received from the author, but that requires remembering the post, finding it, etc.  What's the best way to go about this?  License gurus?

Sean



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This is better to explicit put a MIT licence. If there is no licence, normally you can't do anything with the code.


Le 26 sept. 2010 à 17:45, DeNigris Sean <[hidden email]> a écrit :

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Well, since this discussion is public now :)... exactly what seems to be
the problem?  The book talks about code that is often in the public
Store repository.  Is the problem that the code in the public Store
repository doesn't have an MIT license?  Or is the problem that the book
that talks about the code in the public Store repository doesn't say
"and the code has an MIT license"?

On 9/26/10 7:08 , Serge Stinckwich wrote:
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Andres Valloud-4 wrote

Well, since this discussion is public now :)

hee hee

Andres Valloud-4 wrote

... exactly what seems to be
the problem?  The book talks about code that is often in the public
Store repository.  Is the problem that the code in the public Store
repository doesn't have an MIT license?  Or is the problem that the book
that talks about the code in the public Store repository doesn't say
"and the code has an MIT license"?

Would a license expert weigh in here?  Andres, would it be difficult to add a note to the book specifying that the code in it is MIT?

I'm not a real license expert but I do play one on TV...

The license should be visible, easy to find, and clearly associated
with the code in question. Also, as Monty pointed out at ESUG, make
sure it is possible for people to comply with the terms of your
license. MIT license specifically requires the user to maintain the
copyright notice, so make sure you *have* a copyright notice!

I have no idea if this is relevant in this case--it's just a general
observation but I mention it here because it's one of my big concerns
with open source at the moment--but make sure the contributors (and
not their employers) all own the intellectual property. In many (even
most) jurisdictions, full-time employees may find that their employer
by default owns much of the code they write, even what is written in
their spare time. Contractors usually own their code by default but
most companies who are on the ball will try to assign the ownership to
them in the contract.

Whether you're a full-time employee or a contractor, check your
contracts before contributing to open-source. It is much easier to
request a written IP exclusion in advance than to try to transfer
ownership later. You're doing everyone a disservice if you pollute
open source projects with code that has questionable IP ownership; the
difficulty of defining derivative works makes it very hard to predict
the difficulty of fixing the problem.

Julian

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 3:23 AM, Sean P. DeNigris <[hidden email]> wrote:
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I am not sure the code in the book needs a license.  After all,
eventually you will get the distribution for the source code in question
and then you will (should) have an MIT license... does that make sense?

On 9/30/10 19:23 , Sean P. DeNigris wrote:
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