Re: Concerning 'Arabic Conjugator'

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Youcef Rabah Rahal <rahal at arabeyes dot org> wrote:
> On Sunday 09 May 2004 23:12, Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj wrote:
>
> > Here is the really dumb part, how do you GPL something
> > exactly? I've never read the terms of GPL.
> 
> Then you might want to document yourself ;) Either you google about GPL and 
> other free licenses, or you pick any GPLed program (look at Arabeyes projects
> on CVS for example, and search for LICENSE or COPYING files. Bayani has one 
> BTW). As for releasing something under GPL, there's nothing special to do 
> really, except including the LICENSE file in the release and telling the 
> World (through the README file) that your program is GPLed and that they 
> should read the corresponding file ;)

GPL is a very common license that most of arabeyes' projects are under,

  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

You can, as Youcef notes, look at any of the development projects to get
an idea of what is done - in short, we have a LICENSE file and we have
the same header in all of the .c, .h files.  In whole thing boils down
to pretty much just deciding which license to pursue and then writing that
decision down somewhere so the rest of the world knows - yup, its as simple
as that.

> I think it would be wise to ask for such a written document or something
> from the original author in order to avoid any copyright issues. I'm not
> sure about that so maybe others have better ideas ??

Actually this is beyond wise - I think this is needed (ie. a requirement).
Have him write you an email noting this info.  Also tell him that his name
(and email) will be mentioned in some of the files to give him due credit
for his past work (and see if he a problem with that).  We want to make sure
to create a trace of development history on anything that is on arabeyes
(ie. where it came from, when, by whom, with whose permission, etc).

> > AFAIK, he isn't working on the project anymore. So as
> > for who will be working on the project, I'll
> > contribute as much as I can, but if you really want
> > this extremely small project to take off, you will
> > have to make someone else the maintainer. Someone with
> > more programming expertise than a few courses in
> > introductory programming :)
> 
> It depends on what you mean by 'taking off'... I don't think that we are
> in a real hurry to see 'Conjugator' working ;)). I'd rather see someone
> with no development experience taking the time (a few months or more if
> need be) to learn and then achieve something good than someone with already
> a good experience doing that in a few weeks. Thus we would have one more 
> experienced developer, something which is very needed.
>
> So, I encourage you to take the responsability of this project, take your
> time to learn and ask the more experienced developers (who will be very
> happy to give a hand).

I can't agree more with Youcef :-)  Ahmad.K has experience with both windows
and linux now so he might be able to port it quickly to linux giving you
more time to concentrate on the code on a real/true development platform
(if you so desire).  In all though, the more developers we have the better.

And hey - at least you had a couple of intro classes, some haven't even
had those and are coding away ;-)

Salam.

 - Nadim



	
		
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