From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2007-07-28T04:40:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Rubypub.com - A Ruby Documentation Wiki

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:10:16 +0900, Brian Tol wrote:

> On 7/27/07, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7/27/07, Brian Tol <wiremine@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > To be honest, that was my biggest hesitation in developing the site.
>> > Pissing people off is the _last_ thing I want to do. On the other
>> > hand, since (a) lots of gems need better (or _any_) documentation,
>> > and (b) gems are licensed in such a way that allow for reuse like
>> > this, I thought I'd give it a go.
>>
>> (b) isn't true.  What makes you assume that?
> 
> Good to know. I looked through a couple hundred gems looking at licenses
> before I started this thing, so that's where I got that idea, and looked
> at this page:
> 
> http://rubyforge.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=13
> 
> The "Other/Proprietary License" licensed projects are either (a) dual
> license under GPL, or (b) haven't released anything.
> 
> The remaining gems are released under public domain, CC, OSI-approved,
> or Ruby licenses. From what I've read, and in talking with other people,
> the CC, OSI and Ruby licenses would work with rubypub.
> 
> That all said, violating license terms is really antithetical to
> rubypub's goals, so more feedback is appreciated. Violating licenses
> doesn't help end-users, or gem authors.

Just do an automatic check against the gem's listing on Rubyforge, and 
make sure it's an open source license. If so, then you're free to put the 
docs on your site (assuming you agree with the license yourself), and you 
don't have to pay attention to the author's wishes in contradiction with 
the license at all. (However, you may choose to do so as a courtesey.)

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/