Kalle, Keith, and Mat, Thanks very much, your comments have been very helpful.
Brian O. -----Original Message----- From: Kalle Naslund [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 12:46 PM To: Brian Osborne Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: LGPL (was RE: [Biojava-l] Restriction digest progress) Brian Osborne wrote: >Mat, > >I did read the licenses themselves, I believe I understand them, somewhat. >What I don't understand is the idea that Biojava is distributed under the >LGPL so that it's not under the LGPL. Is this what the Biojava authors >actually want to say? It looks like a typo. Is there a third kind of GPL >license? > >But to answer your answer one of your questions, we here at Cognia have >contributed to Biojava and we're all happy to do so, including the business >people (and I help with Bioperl myself). What's not as clear is the reverse >case, meaning what happens if we incorporate Biojava code into our products. > >Thanks again, > >Brian O. > > > If your "product"s source code dont contain any source code from biojava, and the "product" only makes use of the biojava API ( in other words, your "product" only needs to access the .jar files containing the biojava bytecode ). Then you should be able to licence your "product" under whatever licence you see fit. If you make some changes to the biojava soure code, Those changes must be made publicly available with source. That is the difference between GPL and LGPL, GPL demands that all software that uses GPL software, must be GPL, that means that if you link your code with a GPL library, your code need to be GPL aswell. LGPL does not require code you link to the LGPL code to be LGPL or GPL. <disclaimer> I am not a solicitor, so this is just how i understand things, and is not neccesarily the truth </disclaimer> mvh Kalle _______________________________________________ Biojava-l mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://biojava.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-l
