On 07/07/10 14:16, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> I am writing to ask guidance from anyone expert in LGPL and dual licensing.
> Take hypothetically that I have written a piece of code PMRCODE which is 
> contributed
> to a large project BASE which uses the LGPL licence, the whole of which can 
> be used
> as a library LIB. As a result I decide to use the same licence (LGPL) for 
> PMRBASE.
>
> A company COMP wishes to use LIB in its products in a statically linked manner
> and asserts that this is not possible with LGPL code. COMP therefore wishes 
> LIB to be
> relicensed under a less restrictive licence (e.g. BSD or MIT) or alternatively
> to dual licence the code. As PMRCODE is part of LIB, this would require me, 
> as author,
> to relicence PMRCODE under the same changed licence strategy.
>
> COMP's argument is that  although the LGPL does
> allow for inclusion into commercial closed source projects you either have to
> distribute the LGPL'd portion as a dynamically linked library
> which the end user could replace if desired or a API-based rebuild system. 
> This may
> apparently have undesirable commercial consequences for COMP.
> I would appreciate clarification of these issues -


I don't see anything to clarify - everything you assert is correct.

> I appreciate they are complex. I
> assumed that the LGPL was a reasonable licence system to use and indeed it's 
> widespread
> in the BlueObelisk. However although I'm quite happy for companies to use and 
> resell
> my software - that's part of the OpenSource philosophy - I am not so sure I
> should change my licence because it is a better business model for a 
> downstream commercial
> exploiter.
>    

I agree with that - the LGPL is bending over backwards (more than) enough.

COMP is saying "bend over backwards more so that I can exploit you 
harder".  Frankly, what a nerve they have!  They get fantastic software 
for free and they give us... what exactly? Where's the balance?

Paul.


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