Rails and GPL

rubyonrails-talk
1

Rails and GPL I have some Rails software I am working on that I think I want to eventually release under the GPL. I am looking for advice in this area. Specifically…

  1. Does the GPL comment have to appear in all files, or just certain ones? For example, do I have to include it in the view templates?

  2. Is there a way to get Rails, or the Radrails plugin, or some other Eclipse feature to automatically include the GPL comments in my generated/edited files or do I have to manually add the comments to each one?

  3. Are there other licenses I should be looking at aside from GPL/LGPL?

Any thoughts from people with experience in this area would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Nathan

2

hi nathan!

Nathan Leach [29/08/06 20:35]:

1. Does the GPL comment have to appear in all files, or just certain ones? For example, do I have to include it in the view templates?

well, i decided to include it in *.rb files only, however, not sure about that yet...

2. Is there a way to get Rails, or the Radrails plugin, or some other Eclipse feature to automatically include the GPL comments in my generated/edited files or do I have to manually add the comments to each one?

in order to have it done automatically i slightly modified Rails::Generator::Commands#file to include a given header to every *.rb file. that way both files generated by the rails command and script/generate get that header prepended.

3. Are there other licenses I should be looking at aside from GPL/LGPL?

personally i'd prefer the GPL over nearly any other license! however, as [1] points out, one might consider sticking with rails' (so-called) MIT license even in spite of other preferences. generally, [2] seems to be a good starting point to learn about different licenses.

[1] <http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/65177&gt; [2] <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html&gt;

Any thoughts from people with experience in this area would be appreciated.

sry, not much of that on my part :wink: hope i could help, anyway...

cheers jens

3

RadRails has a Templates feature similar to TextMate's snippets. You could create one of those and insert the lengthy GPL statement into there.

(or perhaps a reference to a LICENCE file in the root of your project?)

Nic

4

Hi Nathan,

1. Does the GPL comment have to appear in all files, or just certain ones? For example, do I have to include it in the view templates?

There is a section in the GPL titled "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs" (at the bottom). I think this is what you want to be reading.

Now, I don't want to be obnoxious/rude/annoying/out-of-line here, especially since I personally like the GPL quite a lot, but I suspect you have not read the GPL recently so I think it might be worth taking the time to do so.

Cheers, Bob