On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 3:01 PM York Shen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Weex just copied about the shared library and 1500 header file from Webkit > which is a mixture of BSD and LGPL license, and 150 of them are under LGPL > license. Though those files are just header files ( .h files), and Weex > dynamic links to the shared library of Webkit. I am still not sure whether > this is a violation of ASF's license policy. If this is not allowed by > ASF’s policy, we can cut down the header files to 50 and all of the files > are under BSD license by a major change. After the change, we still need to > dynamic link to the Webkit which is still a mixture of LGPL and BSD license > at runtime. But any serious programs on Linux at runtime have to link to > glic which is also under LGPL license, we don’t think linking a LGPL share > library at runtime is a problem here. > If it is possible for your end user to replace your runtime dependencies with component which is ALv2-licensed (or compatible), then that is an allowed dependency. Otherwise, unfortunately, it is not. The issue is that we at the ASF want to keep the downstream consumers of our code "safe" from viral licenses. While it is true that LGPL is less viral than GPL, it is nonetheless a so-called Category X license. From your text above, I suspect that this is not an allowed dependency. https://apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x What makes GLIC different is that there are other c-runtime implementations out there, so users of our project aren't required to use that particular implementation. (JPA -> OpenJPA/Hibernate is another example of an application of this principle.) But you say "a mixture of LGPL and BSD license at runtime". What do you mean by that? Is there a way to reduce that to just BSD? Or are you using WebCore or JavaScriptCore? Best, Myrle
