the new oVirt website: live preview!

[Leslie Hawthorn]

On 09/20/2012 06:37 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 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.
+1

I think we should also consider that not all companies are as well 
versed in open source licensing as our employers. Often, a lawyer is the 
*first* decision maker on whether or not a software package is OK for an 
engineering team to use. As with all teams, legal teams are also often 
underresourced and these folks don't necessarily understand FOSS 
licensing matters intimately. Whatever we can do to make their way 
smoother, the more likely they will be to not simply reject oVirt out of 
hand because they could not find the information they needed easily.

If we don't want detailed licensing info on the front page, have 
something in the footer that says "oVirt is open source" and have this 
link to a page with *detailed* licensing information, not just for the 
code but for the docs, iconography, etc.

Best,
LH
>
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Board mailing list
> Board at ovirt.org
> http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/board


-- 
Leslie Hawthorn
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards @ Red Hat

identi.ca/lh
twitter.com/lhawthorn