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I would like to contribute some code to the project, but my employer (Google) will only permit you to do so if the project is licensed under an OSI-approved license (https://opensource.org/licenses). I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that "public domain" code is more complex legally

On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 3:43 PM Red Daly <reddaly@gmail.com> wrote: than code released under one of the OSI licenses.

"SBCL [is] a mixture of BSD-style (for a few subsystems) and public domain (for the rest of the system)" and Google contributes to that project. Perhaps you can point them to that case? Hope that helps. I'm not a lawyer either; I have no idea what would be required to change SLIME's license.

Maybe you don't necessarily need to change the licence of existing code. Just like with the legacy code from Spice Lisp and CMUCL which was public domain, it should be enough to state that the licence for new code is MIT and over time the code base would become a mixture, just like SBCL. I guess this should be ok to appease lawyers. -- Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Maybe you don't necessarily need to change the licence of existing code. Just like with the legacy code from Spice Lisp and CMUCL which was public domain, it should be enough to state that the licence for new code is MIT and over time the code base would become a mixture, just like SBCL. I guess

Thanks for the replies. The idea of using a license for new code might indeed help. I now have some questions out to the open source team here, and I will reply when they get back to me. For some background reading on public domain software from OSI, I found this page informative: https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain On May 14, 2018 8:23 AM, "Luís Oliveira" <luismbo@gmail.com> wrote: On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 3:23 PM Stelian Ionescu <sionescu@cddr.org> wrote: this

should be ok to appease lawyers.

I wouldn't have a problem with that. Would it help, Red? -- Luís Oliveira http://kerno.org/~luis/