Advisory for contributors looking to submit code to the Mudlet project
Please can you ensure your contributions are licensed:
GNU Public Licence Version 2.0 or later or a licence that is compatible with those terms. Currently we release the application as GPLGv2.0 from such source material but if you do not include the "or later" it will cause issues if we have to switch to a newer version of the GPL in the future
[1] - we would then have to track down either you, your estate, your (former) employers, your legal representative and/or your pet cat to get the relevant party to agree to re-license your work under the newer licence or find a way to cut out your contributions and replace them with something equivalent but not derived from that code. {Well, maybe not you pet cat - unless you have shuffled off this mortal coil and left everything to
them}
In case this seems a bit far fetched it was found to be a concern recently and some of the existing developers were worried that we might have to lose several months of valued stuff from one developer who had not been able to agree to the "or later" bit when clearing things with the people who paid them to write software during the course of their work. Fortunately the matter was resolved in a successful manner, but please also be certain if you give us code that you can do so without compromising things like, say, your employment!
For source code contribution that are new files you can include the header contents that can be found in the git source repository files in ./templete/cpp or ./templete/h in the top of the new C++ class ".cpp" or header ".h" files respectively you produce, then:
For all source code contributions: update the copyright line at the top of the file as part of the above mentioned header, so that it includes the year of your contribution and your identifier/contact detail. Although this has not been done totally religiously in the past, for contributions that have been entered by the project leaders inserting patches etc. from others it should still be possible to track those others contributions if necessary - and indeed the github platform we are now using does make the task of determining the parentage of a piece of code easier if if is ever needed to be determined. Nevertheless, putting your moniker at the top of each file that you touch makes it the most simple it could be!
For other items without a copyright "header": that are submitted via github, e.g. icons, a one line comment in the commit message that includes something about licensing the items under the GPLv2 or later (or GPLv2
+) should, IMHO, be OK - with the proviso I'm Not A Layer!
Now that I have got the formal stuff out of the way - you coders get out there and have fun...
[1] It is possible that we may have to change to use the version 3 GPL in the future as some new parts of the Qt libraries will require code using it (with a GPL licence) to be version 3 or later - this will not be a problem with the current Mudlet code as it includes that "or later" provision, but if any component had a version 2 ONLY licence that would be incompatible with such terms.