[ANN] MacHg 0.9.0 : OSX gui client for Mercurial

Mon May 3 03:28:06 UTC 2010

On May 3, 2010, at 5:11 AM, Augie Fackler wrote:

> On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On May 3, 2010, at 4:24 AM, Augie Fackler wrote:
>> 
>>> On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 02:09:07AM +0200, Jason Harris wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On May 3, 2010, at 1:57 AM, Benoit Boissinot wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:20 AM, Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hi All,
>>>>>>> I am pleased to announce the initial public release of MacHg.
>>>>>>> MacHg is a gui client for Mercurial. It runs under OSX 10.6 (Snow leopard).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I guess this is the first native client for OSX?
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is Murky as well by Jens Alfke. MacHg is a bit bigger in scope.
>>>>> MacHg does things in a threaded way and has nice annimations and
>>>>> guiness throughout... Also I will let the dust settle on everything
>>>>> before I compare MacHg to murky. (I am the author of MacHg so
>>>>> obviously I am a bit biased! :) )
>>>> 
>>>> Yeah, and I discovered http://jwwalker.com/pages/macmerc.html in
>>>> OtherTools, but there are no screenshots so I don't have any idea how it
>>>> compares (and the changelog isn't dated, so I don't know if it's still
>>>> maintained).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Users usually like screenshots too :)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ahh yes the sreenshots are here...
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://jasonfharris.com/machg/sceenshots/sceenshots.html
>>>> 
>>>> Nice, I like the "What will happen" (does TortoiseHg do that too?)
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> It's not obvious under which licence your software is. In the repo,
>>>>>> you included mercurial (GPLv2+) and some BSD libraries. If you
>>>>>> distribute your software with mercurial, that probably makes the
>>>>>> resulting binaries GPL.
>>>>>> But technically it seems you only call hg from the command line, so as
>>>>>> long as you don't include Hg in your repo you could use another
>>>>>> license (e.g. BSD or Apache).
>>>>> 
>>>>> That was my understanding of it as well. Basically since I only call
>>>>> the command line mercurial and do all of the interfacing through its
>>>>> public interface then its not a derived work... and so it can be
>>>>> licensed under BSD or GPL, or whatever. I actually spent some time
>>>>> looking around trying to figure out what the best license was and in
>>>>> the end it wasn't so clear.
>>>>> I am basically open to suggestions and if the Mercurial team thinks I
>>>>> should go with GPLv2, or GPLv2+, or GPL3, or GPLv3+, or BSD, or
>>>>> apache, or something else this will obviously carry a lot of weight
>>>>> with me.
>>>> 
>>>> Personnally I'm fine if you go with Apache or BSD (as long as it's free
>>>> and open source), and since you only use the command line, it's fair for
>>>> you to use a more liberal license.
>>>> 
>>>> I'll let other comment about the fact you embedded mercurial's source in
>>>> the repo and in your binary distribution. I guess that makes the
>>>> distributed package GPL but your code can still be under the BSD
>>>> license.
>>> 
>>> IANAL, etc. That said, it's common to include GPL binaries and shell
>>> out to them and not cause license pollution, especially in OS X
>>> binaries where the "binary" is really a directory full of files. You
>>> should be fine with BSD (although it's worth noting that Apache 2
>>> provides some extra nice features above the traditional BSD license.)
>> 
>> Thanks! I looked at:
>> http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/apache2.xml
>> http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/opensourceyourcode.xml
>> 
>> Based on this instead of plain BSD I am then leaning towards Apache2...
>> 
>> One scenario that has me a little worried is say at some stage in the future I need to actually call down into Mercurial. Can I then switch my license to GPLv2+ if I am the copyright holder?
> 
> If you're the sole copyright holder, yes, you can pretty much do what
> you want.

Thanks!

> Other contributors either need to explicitly allow the
> relicense of their IP or assign copyright to you if they exist.

Does it make sense to ask people that contribute if they would agree to release their contributions under say a range of open source licenses, eg they release them under any or all of BSD, Apache2, GPLv2 and GPLv3? That way the licensing can change in the future if necessary and not cause too much pain...

> Relicensing is generally a huge pain, so it's worth taking that into
> account now while you (presumably) have few contributors.
> 
> (again, IANAL, but I've spent too much time doing license wrangling in
> the past, so I figured I should share my knowledge)

Thank you! Its very useful advice.

Cheers,
   Jason

> 
>> Ie if I allow everyone more freedom by going with the BSD or Apache 2 here, can I then switch if necessary (the future versions and subsequent versions would then be GPLv2+ or whatever). There is a python <-> objective C bridge (PyObjC) which I had wondered about using in the future. I kind of like using the command line since it makes a nice MVC separation, and since its the one thing that should be extremely stable between revisions it means greater long term stability.
>> 
>> Thanks for your help. Incidentally, this is my first open source project I have released and of all the ancillary tasks necessary, eg putting up web pages, learning enough css to be dangerous, getting hosting, deciding on a license etc, etc. I found deciding on a license probably the most annoying. I just want to make it free and open (and make sure someone can't turn around and basically claim my work, in surfing around on information about the various licenses, I read that this can happen and you needed to add some clause or other, etc. (I forget the details)). I'd like to be done with it and get on with interesting things and not shoot myself in the foot for any future changes I have to do... But I guess everyone has this problem. Anyway thanks for the suggestions!
>> 
>> Cheers,
>>  Jason
>> 
>> 
>>>>> The upshot is I am trying to release it for free use by anyone, and
>>>>> its donation ware. I was humbly asking that it would be nice if
>>>>> commercial organizations donated something like US$20 per seat, but
>>>>> this is *not* compulsory at all. If they don't think its worth that
>>>>> they can go on using it scott free...
>>>> 
>>>> It seems reasonable to me (and I from what I can see, it's quite common
>>>> on the OSX world).
>>>> 
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> 
>>>> Benoit
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> :wq
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>> 
>> 