Oh gods, I'm way too tired to be doing this at the moment, but here we go anyway. I finally wrapped all things I could think of up to release lQuery and lQuery-Doc. As I predicted, I was well able to finish lQuery-Doc within time and it was a great feeling of success when I finished it. But, then I had to go on to do a whole bunch of other stuff, which is why the release is so late rather than some time during the day.
Writing lQuery-Doc itself was quite a breeze. I had fun doing it and that's quite surprising. It also turned out pretty much precisely as I first imagined it, which is always nice. Of course, I later made some more changes to make the program easier to use, but that's technicalities. Using lQuery-Doc is quite easy and I laid it all out in this nice about page. So if that went so well, what else was holding me up for so long?
Well for one, after finishing it I took a break for an hour or two to do nothing and linger about watching LPs, which certainly prolonged things needlessly. Then I went out to re-write some of lQuery's unniceties to make it better suited for release and rewrote a chunk of its about page. Next I had to write an about page for lQuery-Doc and tidy that package up a bit as well. But the fun didn't stop there. I completely forgot to create separate GIT repositories for the projects, so I needed to split that up as well and add anonymous access to my private repo so that people could actually pull the source from it.
And finally, I needed to settle on a license. This is always a headache, as legalese is equivalent to hell to me and it always gives me a load of trouble trying to figure out what the hell they're trying to say and what you can or can't actually do in the end if software is licensed like that. I've tried to figure out licenses in the past, but never got much of a clue about it. This is also one of the reasons I never released software before. But, now that I was about to, I wanted to find something I could settle on for once (and hopefully for a while).
The GPL has always appealed to me in a way, as I like the idea of giving the users the ability to make sure they're getting the software they want and that they can't be tricked in some fashion. I also like the idea of having to give back to the community, so that we may contribute improvements and everyone can profit from them. However, I don't like to put unnecessary restrictions on people. As such, I certainly do not want anyone to be forced into a license if they merely want to use my software, be it by utilizing it or by binding it as a library. Of course, all this gets really complicated real quick and the terminology on it is always rather vague and hard to interpret. I'm therefore not really surprised that licenses are often as complicated as they are.
Luckily I found a site (although rather late on) that makes the process a bit less painful. After looking around a bit and comparing things here and there and also trying to comprehend the licenses itself despite my ludicrous levels of tiredness, I had found a couple that I could consider: LGPL, Artistic, MPL-2 and the SimplePL. I don't quite like the feel of BSD and MIT style licenses as they are too permissive. They don't ensure that changes are contributed back in some way and certainly don't require you to re-release the source, which is a bit sad to me. Either way, after some closer inspection and final consideration with a fellow programmer (hi @gingerale) I settled on the Artistic License 2.0.
I'm not sure if this is the best fitting license for my needs as there are simply too many out there for me to take a look at them all in full. However, I think this is a good start and something I can settle on for now. As such, I release lQuery and lQuery-Doc under the Artistic license. Hooray!
Now on to the actual releases. You can download both of them from my GIT repositories, which are git://git.tymoon.eu/lquery.git and git://git.tymoon.eu/lquery-doc.git respectively. In case you just want to get a first taste of the two, you can also view their about pages online: lQuery lQuery-Doc. Obviously both of these were (partially) generated with lQuery-Doc.
So yeah. Release. Happy whooo whoo.
Next up: A more sober blog post during whose writing my eyes aren't decomposing from the inside.
Addendum: Excuse all writing, grammatical and logical errors in this post for now as I really need to get to bed right now and cannot fix it up any further.
Written by shinmera