Q. Why choose a modified BSD License?

A. I have chosen to distribute mstor under a modified BSD license for the following reasons:

    - Initially it was an "eeny, meeny, miny, mo" (EMMM) process of picking an open source license.
    The modified BSD license seemed to be the least restrictive of the popular licenses, and also
    the simplest to understand.

    - Since then I've tried to understand a bit more about the available licenses, and I think the
    best way to approach choosing a license is to rule out licenses you DON'T want, thus being left
    with a collection of licenses to apply the EMMM process to. :)

    - If I had chosen the GPL (as I understand it) as the copyright owner I would still be able to
    use this library in proprietary software (as the license I provide to others does not impose
    restrictions on me), but others would not. A side effect of that is that if anyone was to contribute
    back to the project I would not be allowed to use their contributions in my proprietary software
    without their permission. As I may incorporate this library into proprietary software in the future,
    I had no desire to impose restrictions on others with regard to proprietary software.

    - I could probably have chosen the LGPL, which I believe has the benefit of being linkable in
    proprietary software, but derivative works must remain LGPL.


Q. Why did you start your versioning at 0.9 (rather than 0.1)?

A. I think pragrmatism is a rare gift for software developers. When working in a discipline that requires
   such a logical approach, its quite easy to be analytical about everything. Obviously the logical place
   to start versioning is at 0.1, however I think if you are clear about what you are implementing (e.g
   implementing a specification) then there is no need to distinguish between different "partial"
   implementations of that specification (i.e. it is either implemented or it is not). For this reason
   iCal4j uses only a single pre-release major-dot version (0.9) to indicate the implemented specification
   is not yet complete (1.0 will indicate a complete specification).