[go-nuts] List of colors as image/color RGBAs

Is there going to be a LICENSE file?

Oh, I forgot about that. Two questions:
1) What is the least restrictive license?
2) Is there a more-than-introduction to the various licenses that you
particularly like? I've read a couple "brief introductions", but many
articles imply that if you actually want to make decisions about the
licenses you should read more about it.

Thanks

Hi,

1) Many open source projects (Go itself) uses the BSD license. The MIT is
another simple option, but usually people (companies even more) prefer BSD
due to some extra brand protection. So if you want anyone to be able to use
it, then BSD is a pretty nice option (it's also very short, so not much
legal hassle). The GPL family is useful to ensure the code remains open.
About the others I cannot say much since I've got better things to do with
my life than read them :D

2) This is a tough nut to crack. To make the best decision, you should
actually read all of the text of all of them :P. As someone put it on the
net, licenses are there to protect you from something you're afraid of
(e.g. reusing your brand, losing credits, using in proprietary software).
So I guess you should decide what you don't want to happen, and choose
accordingly.

Cheers,
   Peter

GPL will ensure that a library will not be used in many projects these days
-- part of that is due to the FSF holy war, though the other part is due to
the viral nature of GPL. Since Go is statically linked by default, the LGPL
doesn't prevent Go libraries from being viral.

I've also seen quite a few Go projects using the Apache license, which,
iirc, is BSD compatible. For highest Go community adoption (and if you have
no specific reason to do otherwise), the a copy of BSD license found in the
Go source distribution (modified to use your name as copyright holder, if
you like), is the best option. In other words, limiting the number of
different license types makes developers more likely to use your software
-- since they would already be using the Go stdlib, they must include the
BSD license, but use of additional equivalently BSD licensed libraries only
requires an addendum of the copyright holders name(s) to that same license
file. Involving additional license types may require an annotation of which
software components belong to each license type.

Holy war? This is basically political FUD, sorry. GPL is as rational
as BSD even though they serve different goals. But both of those goals
are perfectly legitimate. Even the fact that BSD is more popular (also
b/c easier for proprietary projects) doesn't change anything about it.

I use BSD only to be Go compatible. If Go would have been
hypothetically published under GPL, all of my libs would be naturally
GPL'ed.

-j

PS: It's quite probable that there's some GPL code being used before
your message makes it to this list or before others can read it.

That's essentially my point. Whether or not it's FUD, developers do have
quite a bit of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the GPL, and thus many
are less likely to use it than they otherwise would have been without the
politization. I myself use quite a lot of GPL software (including the Linux
kernel), though because it's not important to me personally that the code I
release is shared back in kind (not that there's anything wrong with
believing the opposite), and to streamline the usability of libraries, I've
started rebranding them as owned by "The Go Authors".

Jan,
Legitimate they may be - but the goals are slightly incompatible. As I
understand the situation (which some call holy war) you can't "freely mix
GPL and BSD". I'm not a lawyer, but I have been told by people I trust that
one must use one or the other. That has implications downstream if you
actually intend to comply (and expect to have others comply) with the
license you chose. My choice was BSD because it made it simpler for people
to use my code - which was why I released it in the first place.

This is not the place for licensing discussions, but I can't resist a
correction: it is entirely feasible to mix GPL and BSD code. Many GPL
programs incorporate some BSD code, including GCC and glibc.

Ian

But not the other way around. Personally i like GPL since it builds in
mutual sharing. I think the viral part is good. :-)

BSD is short enough that you can read and understand its ramifications in a
couple of minutes.

If you just want people to be able to use your code for any purpose, BSD is
a good choice.

Andrew

The WTFPL. [1].

The GPL is an infection as far as I'm concerned. I'll peacefully tolerate
it, but I avoid it when it's reasonable to do so.

[1] - http://wtfpl.org/

Public domain is the least restrictive of all.

-rob

While surfing the subject a while back I found this
http://opensource.org/licenses

Their overview was very readable and seemed unbiased IMO.

A suggestion: `Cadetblue` may be better called `CadetBlue` (there are many
others: `Darkgoldenrod` -> `DarkGoldenrod`), etc.

I thought about that, but is it Burlywood or BurlyWood? The place is two
names, but feels like one word. Similarly, I often see "sky-blue". Is that
two words SkyBlue, or one word, Skyblue? I think Aquamarine is just one
word even though it kind of feels like two. I agree that the legibility is
increased with capitalization, but it seemed easier to have a standard
where the first letter is capitalized, and the rest are lowercase. I'm not
very tied to that though if others feel strongly.

"Public domain is the least restrictive of all.

-rob "

I had read that public domain is bad because it can be unclear what that
means, and so it's safer to just use a very unrestrictive license. I don't
know the truth of that, but in reading about licenses it seemed that what I
thought the license said is not necessarily what it means in a courtroom.
Thanks for all of your inputs on the license.

What it means is one issue, the lack of a warranty disclaimer is another:

http://www.zetadev.com/misc/software-public-domain/

Here's one attempt at fixing these problems:

http://unlicense.org/

I don't disagree about the ambiguity in the absence of a canonical
reference. I remembered there being such a reference, but a search turned
up little standardization as far as word boundaries or capitalization goes.
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#svg-color only specifies all lowercase
names without spaces. Due to lack of such a *standardized* reference, I
agree that there's little point in trying :-P

It makes it clear that the code is being placed in the public domain, and
adds stuff about being provided "as is" etc...

-Tad

After some requests, I changed the name of the package to
colors. https://github.com/btracey/colors. Colorlist is still there, and
will be unless there is a need to move it, but code should be directed to
github.com/btracey/colors instead.

If you changed the import path to end in colors, you should probably change
the package declaration to also end in colors (otherwise people get rather
confused when the expression colors.Black generates a compilation error).

Note: RGBA values are 4-byte structures, regardless of platform, which on
all of Go's supported architectures guarantees it to be as small as (and
often smaller than) a pointer to that same struct. Additionally, using the
value behind a pointer involves indirection, so even on 32-bit platforms,
it'd be rather surprising if an *RGBA were ever faster to access than an
RGBA value. For these reasons, unless you're passing an RGBA to a function
that needs to modify it, there's almost never any reason to create a
pointer to an RGBA value. Furthermore, you shouldn't feel any obligation to
teach people how to use pointers in your README (since it's presumed that
users of your package would already know how and when to use pointers, or
that they need to learn the language through some of the official
resources). That said, it looks like a handy package.

Go style would be PeachPuff, instead of Peachpuff.

Wait, that's a color?

I think this has been discussed before - there is no standard for word
breaks in the 'realm'. Though I agree.
Let's not go there. Have you tried discussing painting a house recently?

I agree as well, but is the correct solution for me to go and decide where
the word breaks are? I don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the
good, but at the same time I'm not interested in arguing where word breaks
are. At least one site has
Peachpuff http://www.bycolor.org/2012/02/peachpuff-color-code-ffadb9.html
(note that this site has Saddle Brown, so they aren't using a first letter
capital
convention http://www.bycolor.org/2012/02/saddle-brown-color-code-8b4513.html
)

It's not in the list of color names for guys so, no. ;P
http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
(note that it's not very popular with girls either anyway).

Yes, PeachPuff is a color:
https://code.google.com/p/leveldb-go/source/browse/leveldb/leveldb_test.go#235

     I haven't heard the phrase "web safe colors" in a while. How
many machines are still running in 8-bit indexed color mode?

     John Nagle