On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 14:34 +0200, Paolo Abeni wrote: > Hello, > > This is a repost, since my previous post seems to be lost. > > I work for an Italian company, Eidosmedia (http://www.eidosmedia.com/), and > we would like to use libmapi for one of our projects. The company is willing > to contribute to the openchange project some development effort: I personally > have some patches pending and I hope to co-operate with the openchange > project in future. But, since our product will be closed source, and libmapi > is GPLv3, we stuck into license issues. > > So the question is: there is any chance of a future re-license of libmapi > under LGPLv3 or later? Is that at least possible (given the dependency of > libmapi from GPLed libraries, i.e. samba/libdcerpc)? > > Thank for any feedback, > > Paolo Abeni
Hi Paolo, As Brad mentioned, Samba4 is GPLv3 or later - so even if OpenChange contributors/developers were willing to move OpenChange to LGPLv3, this couldn't be done. Furthermore I very honestly can't find any good reasons or benefits for OpenChange to move to LGPLv3 at the moment. I'd rather turn the discussion the other way and ask you what would be the drawback in developing a true open source solution? Value is not in the code itself but in the knowledge and experience required to write it. If people take your application and run a concurrent business based on your code, what would be the consequences if something goes wrong? How reactive or good would they be at fixing potential bugs or limitations? If they were, then you could (or not) bring these improvements back to your code again and benefits from their work too. Finally they wouldn't be able to close the source unless they deliberately violates laws, meaning they are also stealing Samba, OpenChange and you without permissions. OpenChange and Samba are both members of the Software Freedom Conservancy and SFLC has experience with similar issues. Regards, Julien. --- Julien Kerihuel [email protected] OpenChange Project Manager GPG Fingerprint: 0B55 783D A781 6329 108A B609 7EF6 FE11 A35F 1F79
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