libk  Check-in [c36308ecd9]

the main coder, lexi hale, is first and foremost a writer, not a coder. this is a side-project of hers and will remain so unless it picks up a significant amount of attention.

while MRs adding support for Windows, OS X, and other operating systems will be gratefully accepted, the maintainer is a Linux and FreeBSD developer, will not be writing such support infrastructure herself, and has limited ability even to vet code for those platforms.

# license

libk is released under the terms of the [GNU AGPLv3](LICENSE). contributors do not relinquish ownership of the code they contribute, but agree to release it under the same terms as the overall project license.

the AGPL may seem like an inappropriately restrictive license for a project with such grandiose ambitions. it is an ideological choice. i selected it because libk is intended very specifically as a contribution to the *free software* community, a community that i hope will continue to grow at the expense of closed-source ecosystems. i have no interest in enabling people or corporations to profit from keeping secrets, especially not with my own free labor (or anyone else's, for that matter).

if you disagree with this philosophy, you are welcome to continue using libc.

# what does the k stand for?

nothing. it was chosen in reference to libc - the letter C was part of the original roman alphabet, while K was added later by analogy to the Greek kappa ‹κ›. in my native language, the older letter ‹c› can make a number of different sounds based on context, including [k] and [s], while ‹k› is fairly consistently used for the sound [k]. and for orthographical reasons, [k] is often represented by the digraph ‹ck› - that is, a C followed by a K. hopefully the analogies are obvious.

this project has nothing to do with KDE.

the main coder, lexi hale, is first and foremost a writer, not a coder. this is a side-project of hers and will remain so unless it picks up a significant amount of attention.

while MRs adding support for Windows, OS X, and other operating systems will be gratefully accepted, the maintainer is a Linux and FreeBSD developer, will not be writing such support infrastructure herself, and has limited ability even to vet code for those platforms.

# license

libk-specific code (obviously excluding the syscall and error tables imported from the linux kernel tree) is released under the terms of the [GNU AGPLv3](LICENSE). contributors do not relinquish ownership of the code they contribute, but agree to release it under the same terms as the overall project license. 

the AGPL may seem like an inappropriately restrictive license for a project with such grandiose ambitions. it is an ideological choice. i selected it because libk is intended very specifically as a contribution to the *free software* community, a community that i hope will continue to grow at the expense of closed-source ecosystems. i have no interest in enabling people or corporations to profit from keeping secrets, especially not with my own free labor (or anyone else's, for that matter).

if you disagree with this philosophy, you are welcome to continue using libc.

# what does the k stand for?

nothing. it was chosen in reference to libc - the letter C was part of the original roman alphabet, while K was added later by analogy to the Greek kappa ‹κ›. in my native language, the older letter ‹c› can make a number of different sounds based on context, including [k] and [s], while ‹k› is fairly consistently used for the sound [k]. and for orthographical reasons, [k] is often represented by the digraph ‹ck› - that is, a C followed by a K. hopefully the analogies are obvious.

this project has nothing to do with KDE.