Hi David, On 9/18/07, David Chisnall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Frederico (please excuse the out-of-order quoting),
No problem, it was easier to read that way. (...) > We're straying off topic here (and the following should have the > standard I am not a lawyer, I have not worked in IP law for a few > years, and this is not legal advice disclaimer), but the GPL does not > actually require the entire work to be licensed under the GPL. This > is a common simplification, but it's not what the legalese states. > What it does require is that the total work be licensed in such a way > that includes the same conditions as the GPL. This is a crucial > distinction, and the one that allows aggregate works to be > effectively licensed under the GPL (...) Yes, that seems logical as well. That at least has been my view all these years, but so many different opinions on everything have been floating around lately... it's interesting that, speaking of legalese, even a license as simple as the ISC one has recently been subject to several different interpretations on what it allows or doesn't allow. Interestingly enough that is one area where the GPLv3 is more clear, allowing a set of further restrictions that seem tailored to the BSD requirements as to avoid problems. (...) > I agree with Jesse. It's good to have these issues raised, and I've > been impressed with the quality of the discussion here. It's a topic > that a lot of people have very strong view on, and this thread has > managed to avoid degenerating into the kind of license flamewar that > seems to be so fashionable on open source mailing lists these days. > Thank you to all concerned for keeping this discussion so civil. Indeed, I'm glad I've not been misunderstood in my intentions. > Now, straying into slightly less safe territory, does anyone have any > views on LGPL 2.1 Vs LGPL 3? GNUstep recently switched to LGPL 3, I > believe. I haven't read LGPL 3 in detail, so I don't have any views > on this yet... I'll admit that the GPLv3 is hairy, and the LGPL3 is a set of exceptions on top of the GPL3 (and hairy exceptions at that). As far as I could tell, the LGPL3 makes the following exceptions to the GPL3: o No patent or circunvection protection of any kind. o Changing the library and distributing it is done by putting the result under the LGPL or GPL (some talk about a "facility" that my brain couldn't parse after 20 tries is probably important, seems to refer to making the library dependent on a custom application). o Using parts of the headers is OK and doesn't need any kind of arragement, using a lot of the information of the headers - something close to verbatim, or something behyond what's generally necessary to make a binary - makes no diference in the license of the binary but forces the inclusion of the GPLv3 and the LGPLv3 and a notice that the library is used in there. o Applications can have whichever license one wants, provided that the library parts that are LGPL3 are not restricted to modification and the license copies also present, etc. o One can combine libraries and distributed the result under any license, but must provide the uncombined part as well and say that they are under the LGPL3 So, not going into what the GPL3 says, it allows for linking, aggregation and distribution of the library without placing restrictions on the license of the application that uses it. More or less the same as the previous GPL, but I'm sure more critical views can add more. It is liberal in terms of runtime linking, object code and all, a bit more strict in what concerns changing or using the code in the library itself. Best regards, Frederico Muñoz _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
