Following my last post, I've put up a quick poll for trying to grasp some knowledge about the way people are using (or not using) MonoRail.

It's not complete, and there will be further polls as I can already think of questions I have for the community, that did not make their way to this poll, and are very important imo.

So, if you care for the future of MonoRail, please do spare some moments to fill in the poll. Be nice and write down your feelings, pain-points and general rants in the text areas. I won't be offended by anything.

No personal details will be published (at least not deliberately - and I don't believe anyone will hack into the lousy SQL server it's stored on).

so, without further ado, I give you the poll:

http://www.kenegozi.com/monorailpoll.html

From the mailing list:

... the PMC decided to make a few changes to the Castle Project:
- Projects will be split
- Each project will have a leader (positions open to any committer)
By that we intent to fix our release debt. as having each project running individually allow us to release and document each one of them without dragging/waiting for others.

We still haven't decided how to solve dependencies and such, but with time I'm certain we'll be able to come up with solution that will benefit the community.

ah, and I have been the one appointed as Project Leader for Monorail.

Quoting again from the mailing list:

We would expect from the leaders to oversee the development (near and long term), set up goals, roadmaps, coordinate the documentation effort and release it.

So my main effort now will be to push a Monorail 1.0 RTM release out of the door. There are many things that need be done before this comes true as in terms of the non-code aspects (like docs, wizards, etc.), Monorail is not as ready as ActiveRecord for example.

I will be posting some specific requests for help on the various tasks that will need to be done. I hope that with the aid of the community, we will have a release soon-ish.

explanation (before the wife kills me): I have some free time in the coming months, so I'm looking for interesting consulting gigs.

So, if you're in a company / dev team, and looking for some help with Castle (Windsor, MonoRail), NHibernate, or general information system design and architecture advices or training, setting up build and test environments, or any other of the things I rant about in this blog, then I'm your guy.

I also do web-client ninja work, dancing the crazy css/html/javascript tango (jQuery: yes, Ms-Ajax: no)

I currently live in Israel, but I'm fine with going abroad for short terms if you're an off-shore client.

you can contact me at "ken@kenegozi.com"

This is the first post on open source software licensing series. you can find the primer here.

I'll start with covering the concepts that I'll use in the following posts:

OSI (Open_Source_Initiative)

A bunch of dudes who deal with the approval of open source licenses, according to their ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative

The use of OSI Approved licenses is advocated, in order to simplify the whole OSS licensing things.

OSD (Open Source Definition)

Look at the linked wiki page. In short, any license that conforms to the principals in this definition is considered an open source license
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Definition

Copyleft

A license that requires any code that uses it's covered software, to also apply the same (or similar) license. Also known as "Viral licensing".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
There are different flavours of Copyleft:

Strong Copyleft

Every thing that's using the software, either in binary or source form, becomes infected.
Say you write application A, and reference dll B which is licenses with a Strong Copyleft license, then your application A must retain the same license as B.
The only way to avoid being infected is to use the library without linking, such as by calling it through a command line call and parsing the output, or calling the library as an external service through web etc.
Example for a Strong Copyleft license: GPL

Weak Copyleft

Only derivative works must retain the same license. Normally you should be able to reference a binary of a Week Copyleft licensed library, and use your license of choice (as "Code that uses the library")
Examples for Weak Copyleft licenses: LGPL, MPL (Mozilla Public License), Ms-PL (Microsoft Public License)

Non-Copyleft

licenses that are not viral, thus are not infecting a client code using them.
Examples: BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), MIT and ASL (Apache Software License)

GPL compatibility

Since GPL is a Strong Copyleft license, it requires that every code which uses a GPL-ed library must become GPL. The obvious thing here is that a software without any open-source distribution cannot be used in a GPL-ed library. There are even some open source licenses that cannot be used with GPL due to restrictions in their licenses. Any open source license that allow licensed software to be used with GPL (that is - to be re-licensed as GPL) is said to be "GPL Compatible"

An example for a non GPL compatible OSS license is IBM's CPL

I happened to discuss Open Source licensing with a few peers lately, and being an active OSS user and committer, they've asked me to write down my take on the matter.

It took me a little while to get down to it, but like many other things, doing stuff incrementally seems to be the best option.

I'll try to cover the popular licenses. and those I have an opinion about.

disclaimer: I am *not* a legal advisor. I have never went to any law school, and the opinions in this series is based only on common sense and my ability to read English. 

The first post in the series is OSS Licensing - terms and concepts