[OT] Advice on releasing a simple program under GPL

Larry Cook lcook at sybase.com
Wed May 14 15:51:29 EDT 2003


In my quest to use Linux more frequently, I wanted to transfer my saved email 
from Juno 5.0 to Mozilla.  I discovered that Juno 5.0 uses Berkeley DB to 
store email.  After dumping the key/data pairs I was able to figure out enough 
  so that I could write a program to extract the email into MBOX files, one 
for each Juno folder.

While I developed this on Linux for my own use, there are many in the Juno 
user community that could benefit from this program.  So I compiled the code 
using (ackkkk!) The-compiler-studio-that-shall-not-be-named.

So my questions are:

1) Is it acceptable to just release an executable initially and later follow 
up with a subsequent release that is GPL'd and includes the source?  If I just 
want to release an executable then technically it's not Open Source, right? 
So I guess in that case I would just include a copyright notice.  Anything 
else?  Does that cause any problem if I want to GPL it latter?  I'm really 
just being lazy here as I want to clean up the code some more and I'm not 
confident that I will have all of the bases covered as far as GPL goes, even 
though I have read about GPL'ing your code on the GNU website.

2) What should I do to ensure my code is properly GPL'd?  I've put the 
recommend GPL summary and my copyright in the source file.  I guess I should 
also have the program print something to stdout.  What's the minimum it should 
print?  Should I include something in the README file?  I will be including 
the GPL as a file called COPYING.  So far the deliverables would include:

COPYING
README
juno5bdb.exe
src/Makefile
src/juno5bdb.dsw
src/juno5bdb.dsp
src/juno5bdb.c

Anything else I should include in the deliverables?

Thanks,
Larry





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