[AD] A5 licence/license

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Following the discussion that started in this thread: http:// www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/598019, there is (again) the question of what license Allegro 5 should be under. It does not seem desirable to keep the giftware license.

Three alternate licenses were proposed, the MIT, BSD and Zlib licenses.

Zlib seems well liked and is very free, similar to Allegro's current license. As Peter Wang pointed out there, it has the drawback that code under Zlib license is not accepted for Google Code.

The wording of the MIT license is a bit vague and it is otherwise identical to a one-clause BSD license.

There is also the question of how to identify the development team. A proposal (by me) is "The Allegro 5 Development team".

There is also the question of spelling. The American spelling license seems most common (in this context), which is of course a perfect reason to adopt "licence" instead. ;)

For reference, there is a list of open source licen(c|s)es at http:// www.opensource.org/licenses/category. We should probably pick one of those anyway, and possibly (as Peter suggested) one that is "widely used with strong communities". To my personal taste, most are too long and complicated and I prefer a really simple and short one over something long and complicated.

As for my personal preference, any of the above three mentioned I think are fine. Zlib perhaps being closest in spirit to A4's giftware license.

Evert




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