First, thank you! A lot of editors would probably have quit a long time ago if we didn’t have the tools that have been created on top of WME to make our editing lives easier. I know that there are a lot of struggles to keep them going, and I thank you all for the work and efforts gone into each script, fix, change, whatever. You’re all freaking awesome!
Now for my ask, or maybe askS. The first is pretty easy, put a license on your code. Whether you use a BSD or GPL type license, it’s helpful for other scripters. Not sure what license to do and don’t want to read all that legalese? Creative Commons licenses are really straight forward. Why do I think this is important? Some folks may consider code that has no license a “free for all” meaning they can do anything they want with it, while others are at the other end and it has the strictest of licenses. This is important for some because if you find you no longer have time to maintain the script, or Waze in general, and just disappear, folks may be dependent on it. If others are in the latter camp of “strictest license” then your script then dies, and it becomes hard for somebody else to help maintain.
My second ask, ties in with the first one, we all absolutely understand folks getting busy, work, life, family. If you find that becoming the case, consider turning the script over to somebody else, and posting in the script forum thread that you have done so. Not sure who might be the right candidate? Check out WazeDev. A lot of scripts have found a home here, be it that the author decided to put it there to start, or it was inherited into the project, it’s a great place to allow many script editors access to the code and contribute to it.
Because I really don’t fancy having to trawl through the list of all existing licences to see if there’s one that meets my particular desires, does anyone here know if there’s a licence which basically says:
[i]"You can use my code for inspiration when writing your own code, you can modify it directly for your own use (e.g. to fix a bug whilst waiting for me to release an official update), and you can redistribute diffs/patches/etc to help others fix bugs in their own copies.
Otherwise, unless you ask first and get my go-ahead to do so, then the only person who can release new versions of this code, or re-use any extracts of it in another piece of code, is me. And if you do ask first, don’t be surprised if I start out trying to dissuade you - I know how bad my code is so I don’t mind the extra effort required to maintain it, but I wouldn’t really want to dump that workload on someone else who doesn’t know what they’d be letting themselves in for…
And when the time comes that I’m rendered incapable of updating it any further, then any public annoucement of this fact within the relevant user community shall act as an immediate revocation of this licence, to be replaced with one that lets anyone do anything they like with it, so long as any derivatives of it are made available for all to use freely and without restriction. I’ve never asked for nor received any remuneration for the endless hours of toil I’ve put into it over the years, because I strongly believe that by working on this code for free I’m repaying my debt to the FOSS community for all the good stuff I’ve made use of myself over the years, and anyone who chooses to adopt my code as their own should do so in the same spirit."[/i]
