On 08/12/11 01:19 AM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > > Closer to home for me, the NASA Open Source License (which was conjured up a > decade or so ago) is apparently incompatible with just about everyone else's > licenses. They had a "How do we encourage Open Source use at NASA" symposium > a few months back hosted at Ames with lots of remote participants and > licensing issues and complexities is, in my opinion, probably one of the > bigger problems. It's been a royal pain for me trying to release stuff to > the general public in a useful form. It sure would be nice to be able to > give someone an .iso and say, here, load this, run make clean; make all, and > you'll have your stuff ready to run. But no, that .iso will be a derived > work comprised of a multitude of components with all sorts of different > license agreements. What we have to do is the (to me) accursed approach of: > here's a list of eleventy-seven URLs and FTP sites, go get these files, check > their MD5 to make sure they're the same one we used, and have at it. Hi Jim,
For this exact problem you've described an ebuild could be a very good solution. (I've personally abandoned gentoo a long time ago) By solution I mean bash script that explicitly checks the hashes, resolves the deps and pulls the source to build everything from the eleventy-seven URLs and FTP sites. The people working with gentoo-science would likely appreciate it a lot. (The learning curve is fairly low if you know bash already) -------- With regards to open source license proliferation and incompatibilities. I think most people in the community are working towards streamlining, but changes after-the-fact can be difficult/impossible. I'm empathetic to your situation and I'd say work towards getting your projects merged with something like gentoo to start and then maybe something like OpenSuSE build service. This would cover a very large % of the packaging/distribution problem and get it in the hands of users easily. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
