Article

|

This post has two main purposes in my mind: write an idea down, in case I find myself able to return to it; put the idea “out there,” in case anyone else wants to pick it up and run with it.

About a year ago I had the nebulous idea for a simple directory built around webmention:

  • sites would add themselves by creating a post which sends a webmention to the directory.
  • The directory would retrieve and parse the post to retrieve site name, base url, feed links, etc.
  • Any tags and categories marked with p-category would be used for directory classification and organisation.
  • There would be a simple administrative queue for approvals and data cleanup (parsing errors and the like). Sites wouldn’t appear until they were approved.
  • Site owners could preview what an unapproved directory listing would look like by signing in with IndieAuth. They’d also be able to delist themselves/make changes (also possible through webmention).

I never had a chance to get further than very initial experiments with this, so I’m wondering if I should just let the domain (indieweb.directory) expire in a couple of days, or renew it “just in case.” I can’t see me having any extra free time this year to actually do something with the idea.

article

|

I received an email from a developer the other day, who had forked the repository for my “IIS Express Here” shell extension on GitHub [editors note – no longer available]. He had noticed there was no license information available in the project, so asked if I could either add a license, or give him written permission to adapt my code and share it to others (as is the spirit of GitHub and OSS).

To be honest, this wasn’t something I’d thought about before, and was a bit of an oversight on my part. I’d not really considered the need to add explicit licenses to my repositories. After all, the code is out there anyway – it’s open to use on GitHub, and I’ve often shared it on this blog… if someone wanted to copy the code, they could, right?

Unfortunately, this creates a grey-area, which some are naturally uncomfortable with. Can I use this code in something else? Can I modify it at all? Do I have to pay royalties if I do?

But licensing is hard, isn’t it? All the different types, with different caveats, liabilities, and legal mumbo-jumbo… well, yes, it can be hard. The good folks at GitHub have a solution: ChooseALicense.com is attempting to demystify open source licenses so you can pick the right one for your project. More than this, when you create a new repository on GitHub, the site will ask if you want to add a template license during the initialisation process:

repo_licenses

Coming back to the developer who emailed me – I mailed him back to let him know that IIS Express Here is now licensed under the MIT license. This fits best with how I see the code and projects I share on this blog (unless noted otherwise) – free for anyone else to use, but with no warranty, so if something goes wrong then I’m not liable and it’s not my responsibility to fix it. I haven’t got around to updating all of my repos with licenses, as I’m evaluating each one in turn, based on my goals and even whether the project is going to archived.

ChooseALicense.com