Python, licenses and CVS

[phil hunt]

On Sun, 25 Nov 2001 23:42:20 GMT, Hans Nowak <wurmy at earthlink.net> wrote:
>Howdy y'all,
>
>I'm currently developing a program (in Python, obviously) and plan to 
>publish it. Before I do so, though, I would like to have some opinions
>on the following:
>
>- should I use a license / copyright notice?

Yes

>- if so, which one would you recommend? 

Depends on what you are trying to achieve.

>I know of the GPL, Python license, BSD license etc, and opensource.org
>has a long list of them, but I absolutely hate legalese, and reading
>all of this and pondering the possible consequences of picking one
>over the other makes me cringe. Does someone have a pointer to a
>page with some concise explanations of these licenses?

If you want a copyleft license, choose the GPL. If not, consider
the BSDL.

>Then there's a second point: I see that many projects use version
>control (usually CVS). I tried using DJGPP's cvs, but it 
>(unsurprisingly) doesn't work well on WinXP. There's such a thing
>as WinCVS, but the whole process strikes me as clumsy... checking
>in and out and committing every time something changes... what is
>the point of this? What happens if you forget a step? Does it have
>substantial benefits over versioning your files by hand, aside from
>having a repository through which you can undo changes?

Depends. If only one person is working on the project, CVS is overkill.

If lots of people are working on it, it's a good idea.

-- 
*** Philip Hunt *** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ***