What is the situation in licensing a particular gem ? For example, I can
download and install the rails gem with “gem install”, and this
procedure
does not ask me to agree with the particular licensing rules ? It just
installs straightforwardly.
What is the situation for a particular gem that I develop ? I can
include
some license.txt or a similar file, which states the legal conditions of
the
usage, but how do I make my clients able (or perhaps force them to agree
if
they want the installation) to see the license - so that they are aware
of
what is going on ? For example, Eclipse plug-ins can always ask for such
agreement before the actual installation happens ?
I don’t think RubyGems has a mechanism for pre-install license agreement
confirmation. If this is an important feature for you, try asking on
the RubyGems list.
Personally, I’d be annoyed if every gem I installed had a click through
license prompt.
I am interested in the general way that a Ruby/Rails developer
approaches
this problem. Okay, she finds some gem that is needed for her project,
executes “gem install”, no agreements are asked, and the gem is
installed
successfully. But has she checked the License.txt file before that ? I
mean,
do Rails developers have this habit ? Because if you just install
blindly
thousands of gems… at one point in time you’ll be simply lost in all
these
libraries. That being said, I believe that it will be useful to have a
way
(an optional way, of course) to enforce agreement during gem install.
I am interested in the general way that a Ruby/Rails developer approaches
this problem. Okay, she finds some gem that is needed for her project,
executes “gem install”, no agreements are asked, and the gem is installed
successfully. But has she checked the License.txt file before that ? I mean,
do Rails developers have this habit ? Because if you just install blindly
thousands of gems… at one point in time you’ll be simply lost in all these
libraries.
Since a) Gems are delivered as plain ol’ Ruby scripts, and b) Ruby is
highly dynamic, you’ll quickly notice that pretty much all gems are
under one form of OSS license or another. Which means “licensing is
not a big deal”.
I’m guessing you are hailing from an enterprise-y / corporate
background (I’m asking because that’s where licensing question are the
most common)?
That being said, I believe that it will be useful to have a way
(an optional way, of course) to enforce agreement during gem install.
Why? You did research the libraries you need, and made sure that they
meet your requirements long before you issued the install command,
didn’t you?
Also: “optional” and “enforcement” don’t belong together. Either it’s
a user-configurable setting (which would have to be off by default,
otherwise you break deployment scripts), or it’s an
author-configurable setting which isn’t really optional from the
consumer’s perspective.
–
Phillip G.
A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start,
and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim.
– Leibnitz
).