orca-robotics
INTRODUCTION
Overview
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Documentation
REPOSITORY
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Utilities
Software Map
DEVELOPER
Dashboard
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Hydro License and Copyright
License
The Orca-Robotics project does not, as a policy, require code to conform to any specific license to be included in the distribution. However, the code is required to have a license and the license must be Open Source. That is the official policy.For a complete up-to-date list of licenses see the LICENSE file included in your distribution.
Generally speaking, most of the code in the Hydro libraries and components is covered under the Library GNU Public License (LGPL) as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Most of the remaining code is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL), also defined by the FSF.
The LGPL (as opposed to the GPL) is used whenever possible to allow commercial enterprises to build closed-source products using Hydro technology. It could be argued that component code should be released under GPL because nobody links against it and it could be used in a commercial component-based system. We prefer the LGPL license because it makes it easy to factor out some code into a library and link to it from several components.
Copyright
Copyright belongs to developers and major contributors. The copyright is recorded in a comment block at the top of every source file. We would like to leave it up to the current copyright holders to distinguish between "major" and "minor" contributions.Here's how it works. The creators of the newly added component or utility put their names as copyright holders. Major contributions by other people are acknowledged by the current copyright holders by adding new names.
In other words:
- if you are not on the list: don't add yourself.
- if you are on the list: be nice to others.
It seems fair.
