Releasing open source software

[djurodrljaca]

I have been writing a program (library) in Qt4 and I would like to "release" it somewhere.

The program (library) that I am writing is an EDA (Electronic Design Automation). I am currently writing the back-end part (library in library form) in Qt4 and later I intend to make a front-end part in KDE4. Since I am using Qt4 (and later KDE4) it will work on Linux and Windows (maybe even Mac). At the moment I don't intend to use any external library (except Qt4 and KDE4), so it should be portable...

I have some questions:
1) Which open source license should I use (GPL v2/v3, LGPL...)?
2) Which "software hosting system" should I use (SourceForge, BerliOS...)?

I have no experience with this, so I am asking you guys to guide me.

[Brandybuck]

For a library, please use the LGPL (or BSD). I believe this is a strong KDE suggestion for libraries, and required for anything going into the core KDE libraries.

[djurodrljaca]

Thanks for the info.

Now I have to decide which version of the LGPL to use: v2, "v2 or later" or v3?
At the moment I think "v2 or later" looks like the best choice... (if I understood it correctly it is compatible with GPLv2 and GPLv3)

Since SourceForge has the most users/projects I will probably register there.

I have another question: what is the procedure for licensing a program under GPL/LGPL?

[petercruickshank]

Here is "the procedure", as given straight from the FSF:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

[dvmorris]

Does anyone have any tips for automating the actual process of sticking license information into the source code? I have a TON of files in my project and I don't want to copy paste it all in each file. Also, is there a general tutorial for which files to put where and exactly what to say where in each directory of a project, or is that important? I would really like to do this whole licensing thing right, but I'm not sure where to start...

thanks for the help,

dave

[jacek]

Does anyone have any tips for automating the actual process of sticking license information into the source code?
You can try something like this:

LICENCE=/.../licence
for f in `find ...`; do
cat $LICENCE $f > $f.x
mv $f.x $f
done
(make sure you make a backup of your sources before trying it).


Also, is there a general tutorial for which files to put where and exactly what to say where in each directory of a project, or is that important? I would really like to do this whole licensing thing right, but I'm not sure where to start...
You have to add a comment in every source file you wrote with information about copyright and licence (see the link in previous post for exact text) and you have to add a file with full licence text to your sources (it's usually named COPYING or LICENCE).

[dvmorris]

I seem to remember someone telling me that emacs has a script that does this for you, but i also just found this site that will help a lot:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/SourceFileTemplates

thanks for your advice,
dave