the new oVirt website: live preview!

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 03:18:20PM +0200, jwildebo at redhat.com wrote:
> On 09/20/2012 02:57 PM, Dave Neary wrote:
> 
> >IMHO, the license matters at earliest when you're downloading (so not on
> >the front page),
> 
> Disagree. It should be on the front page. For various reasons. The
> main reason being that it is a fundamentally important thing to
> know. A short thing like "Open Source mainly under ASL 2.0,
> specifics here" where "here" is a link to the detailed license page.
> 
> Doesn't hurt at all and makes it clear upfront what we are doing here.

I agree with Jan. I'm obviously far from your target user or
contributor (unless they are the sort that likes to or has to check
with their lawyers, which could well be the case). However, two things
that I find extremely annoying about so many project websites are (1)
you have to go through multiple steps to get *any* idea about how the
software is licensed, and (2) when licensing information is given, it
tends to be inaccurately simple (because it is rarely the case that
licensing can be reduced to one license). A statement like Jan
suggests addresses both of these problems.

Sadly, if it's a project I'm just finding out about, I don't trust the
mere statement that it's "open source", and even when that's a
reasonably accurate statement it isn't specific enough to be helpful
to people who care about these things.

- Richard