A collection of opinions, thoughts, tricks and misc. information.
Those of us that write open source applications have something to worry about, and it comes in the form of the GPL agreement:
one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Notice the statement in bold... Some of us are quite comfortable with version 2 at the moment, and version 3 is starting a pretty nice controversy (search slashdot for articles related to gpl v3 and read up).
Do yourself a favor when writing an open source application under the GPL license and avoid the issues with the upcoming GPL v3. Use this text instead of what you're getting from the gnu site at the moment:
Copyright (C) YEAR YOUR_NAME
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2,
as published by the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Change is scary, remember?