[OH-Dev] New tools directory

[Asheesh Laroia]

Excerpts from Daniel Mizyrycki's message of Wed Jun 20 20:04:04 -0400 2012:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> Here is part of the discussion we are having with Asheesh about the 
> advantage of a tools directory, and in particular a tool that will 
> automatically remove trailing whitespaces on commit.
> >>>> Also, thank you for cleaning up my previous docs. As I mentioned, I
> >>>> have a small git pre-commit script that removes trailing whitespaces.
> >>>> I include it in my git repos under tools directory and link it to
> >>>> .git/hooks/pre-commit. It might be worth to create such a directory,
> >>>> and to provide a tool like this.
> >>> Yeah, honestly, I think that would be superb, so long as we can
> >>> document it well!
> >>>
> >> Excellent point. The tool is a hack of what I found at
> >> http://stackoverflow.com. It is good enough for me and I think  a good
> >> start for this project. I uploaded it in
> >> https://github.com/mzdaniel/oh-mainline/commit/f500f3ad43125778c2854d51f37dc7a92ffec7f3
> >> . There is no harm in adding the tool as one need to create a symlink
> >> into .git/hooks to be operational. The question now is where we want to
> >> iterate.
> > That is interesting. Let's have that be a separate thread.
> >
> > In general I'm excited about it, but I'm concerned about the copyright status
> > with stuff just found on StackOverflow (maybe it's usable? I'm just not
> > sure), and also it'd be great if we can document how to use those git
> > hooks.
> Such a shame. Here is a snippit of their contract:
> You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network 
> is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the 
> Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 
> <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/> license. You grant 
> Stack Exchange the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, 
> copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative 
> works and store such Subscriber Content and to allow others to do so in 
> any medium now known or hereinafter developed ("Content License") in 
> order to provide the Services, even if such Subscriber Content has been 
> contributed and subsequently removed by You.
> 
> The keywords here is that the contribution is licenced to StackOverflow. 
> In general, I wonder if the fact that the work was released as CC BY-SA 
> gives us any right at all. In particular, I will create a new tool using 
> python for this task. I just wanted to have something to start with, but 
> legal liability truly takes all the passion of opensource.

The fact that it's licensed by-sa to StackExchange does mean that
we are permitted to use it under the (fairly permissive) terms of
the Creative Commons by-sa 2.5 license, actually!

So I would say, if you don't want to rewrite it, make a note at the
top with that quote from their contract page, and we'll just agree
that the one file in our repository is licensed CC by-sa 2.5.

A slightly weird license for software, but livable, in my opinion.

-- Asheesh.