Tools and licenses

PeterM — Fri Aug 24, 2012 6:39 pm

Author: PeterM

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2012 6:39 pm

Reading the magazine about licenses got me thinking; for years I've compiled and used cgrep for certain scenerios. It's really good as well. The thing is, I have never actually looked at the license, which is the Lucent public license, I only know that because I've just looked it up. It's on sourceforge now, whereas I always remember having to download it from bell labs.
So it got me thinking, if a tool like cgrep had, for arguments sake, a license that was not compatible with other bits of software on the same machine, would that mean we have to start asking lots of nice questions to people who already maintain a similar tool, in this case the maintainers of GNU grep, to get features included, or would it be best to get someone with the right skills to create a new tool?

I don't think it matters too much in the case of cgrep and I'll keep compiling it anyway - old habits and all that. It might even be the case that GNU grep can do all the stuff cgrep can, but this is just a case of me not keeping up with any new features that have been added to grep.

Linux Format forums

Tools and licenses