Monday, April 5, 2021

I started #4081 and changed the license of lino, lino_xl and lino_book from BSD to AGPL. The other repositories will follow. I discussed this decision orally with Tonis and Sharif, who appreciated the move from BSD to GPL. I didn’t yet manage to talk with Hamza, but I assume that he appreciates it as well.

Also updated the Contribute to the code where I added a section “Before getting started”.

En passant I started to check and review the cg, which was quite scaring at places.

I have been thinking and writing much about this topic: Why software should be free. I believe that intellectual property was a bad idea for humanity and that it is time to get rid of it. But of course that’s a crazy claim, and I don’t know the truth, I am just a average-talented programmer with a tendency to philosophy, and with age I am getting more audacious. Changing Lino to the AGPL is my legal commitment that I will rather grow potatoes and chicken than accepting to write non-free software.

Wow, and it seems that I managed to finish #4079 before midnight: We have a new doctree, the Lino Hosting Guide, which I cut out of the book and moved into a separate repository, hosted at https://gitlab.com/lino-framework/hg and rendered at https://hosting.lino-framework.org

The tricky thing was to handle dependencies: the Hosting Guide can refer to the Community Guide, but not to the Developer Guide. We have the following dependence tree:

Community Guide –> Hosting Guide –> Developer Guide

The main trigger was that I’d like Hannes to start maintaining the Hosting Guide.