Bazaar Licenses

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John Arbash Meinel writes:
 > Usher, Sean (Sean) wrote:

 > > We plan on using it to version our code, we might make changes to
 > > Bazzar, nad we would not distribute it to the public in any way.
 > > 
 > > So it sounds like we should be fine in using it then wiothout worries.

Pretty much so.  There are some potential issues with giving copies to
contractors or other companies in your group, as Russel pointed out.

 > So just realize that under almost every other "standard" license, you
 > wouldn't have access to the code in order to modify Bazaar to do what
 > you want/need. (For example, I can't tweak Microsoft Office because I
 > don't like some default action it provides.)

There are no "standard" proprietary licenses I know of. :-) Every
company has a different one (and usually several).  But there are
plenty of standard open source licenses, some of which will yank
chains on Sean's lawyers, many of which won't.  IIRC Bazaar, git,
Mercurial, and current versions of CVS are "copyleft" (GPL), while
Subversion has a permissive license (lawyer-soothing).

 > That said, if you are modifying an open source program, it is often
 > *morally* proper to make those changes public.

What Robert said.

I'd put that, "Sean, please do consider spending 15 or 20 minutes
trying to persuade your PHBs to release any code back to the project.
We'd all be very grateful.  It costs nothing in most cases (you had to
write the code anyway), it's good advertising for your firm in certain
communities, and it's often a very cost-effective way to offload
maintenance costs on to a third party.  Besides, you'll feel good
about it."