[Om] Questions about representing units

[Christoph LANGE]

Hi Jonathan,

On Saturday 21 February 2009 21:59:24 Jonathan Stratford wrote:
> By "service", are you envisaging a proper web service?

Not at the moment, and maybe never, as we're aiming at a lightweight
infrastructure.  Our understanding of "web service" is a broad one at the
moment -- something that is available on the web, that does something useful,
and with which we can communicate in HTTP.  And that is certainly the case
with your converter :-)

> I don't know much about those, and my program isn't one -- just a standard
> exe with a PHP front-end. As such I'm not sure how easily you could
> integrate it into anything else.

As long as we can send input strings to the converter, it's OK.  OpenMath
input/output would be more convenient, though, that's why I asked for that.
But otherwise we don't have any special requirements (like a SOAP or XML-RPC
interface).

> I'm happy to give you my program...

Great, thanks!  I'll see whether I can get it to run.

> I hadn't thought about releasing the code under licence..no idea how I'd go
> about doing so, but it might be a good idea if I could find out what it
> entails.

Here is a crash course: Common open source licences, such as the GPL, are
usually of a "copyleft" style, which means that they are infected with the
virus of freedom.  Any user of software under such a licence enjoys the
freedom to use this program for any purpose, to change the sources, and to
redistribute it to others.  Whenever somebody changes the sources, he has to
redistribute the changes under the same licence, which makes sure that all
future modifications will be as free as the original.  You may want to look
into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_licenses.  Licencing
your software does not require more than adding the licence text as a file,
commonly named COPYING.

Cheers,

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype duke4701

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