On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Alan Wolfe wrote:

Please don't top-post.

> That would be awesome to have a deffinitive list of credits or instructions
> that would allow you to satisfy the licensing for the entire package and
> what it links to.
>
> As it is, a lot of companies shy away from anything even resembling a legal
> risk and it's hard to convince people sometimes (pointy haired bosses) that
> open sourced/free software is good, and secure and is ok to use so having
> something like that would deffinately help :P

Do they really? If a lack of such a list is the only thing that prevents these
companies from using open source software, then I'd rather have them stay away
since they're clueless anyway and having them use our software won't help us
much.

We already provide:

  #1 - the COPYING license text
  #2 - the FAQ answering licensing questions
  #3 - the LICENSE-MIXING document describing the license situation for all
       possible third party libraries libcurl might use
  #4 - the DISTRO-DILEMMA document describing the GPL issue (this document
       might be a bit outdated atm)

(all of these are also available on the web site)

The fact that the license is a MIT license derivate also lets you read up
about it on numerous other places on the net about your freedoms and
responsibilities with it.

I'm not against more documents and further details, I just don't think adding
one to the pile is what will make the pointy haired bosses of the world to
suddenly start using libcurl.

I think they rather need proper open source education: explain what it is, how
it works, what you gain and similar things.

Using anybody else's code/product is _always_ a legal risk to companies. This
is not only so with open source - every single component you get/buy/download
from elsewhere comes with a license and you need to adhere to them etc. The
notion that this is harder or more complicated with open source is mostly a
myth in my experience.

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  Commercial curl and libcurl Technical Support: http://haxx.se/curl.html