[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
More information about the gnhlug-discuss
mailing list