Re: [Fsfe-uk] Java licensing

[Sam Liddicott]

Alex Hudson wrote: On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 16:15 +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote: In general, I think the LGPL is a pretty tough license to stick to - I would be interested to hear your reasons for thinking this. it's a lot easier to fulfil the terms of the GPL. Surely the only management difference with the LGPL is that you share less source. If your changes are minimal you can probably submit them back to the project maintainer. Most other obligations of the GPL happen naturally if you don't interfere with the build tools. Well, I have mixed views on the LGPL for a number of reasons. I think it achieves what it set out to achieve, and does it pretty well, but it's not a licence I would ever want to use. And, if I had to distribute software that was LGPL'd, I would do so under the terms of the GPL (via the conversion route). In terms of the extra 'toughness' compared with the GPL, it mostly comes up if you're a proprietary software developer (eg., the need to maintain strict ABI compatibility with the library) I don't see that this is an extra burden, although you must "permit" others compiled copies of the library to link with yours, its up to them to use the right tools. You'd always compile the library yourself with the same tools you compiled your application with. so you might not care, but then there isn't really a good reason for the LGPL without proprietary software (AIUI, the FSF encourages free software authors to use the GPL in all cases now, which they didn't use to). indeed There are other restrictions in the LGPL (such as 'modified libraries must remain libraries' [you can't make applications out of them], interesting, not even GPL applications? (Not that you'd want to make an application out of it except for proprietary machinations?) and the requirement to document modifications is much stronger) which I don't like, and definitely do affect you if you're a free software author. As a standalone licence [which it isn't, but, you know..], it would be difficult to call it a free software licence I think. And there is also some stuff I don't really understand (requirement 2d. does my head in, frankly), and haven't ever bothered to understand. I don't think it's as good a licence as the GPL, but then the GPL was designed for all software - the LGPL is very much a license for libraries, and I think is pretty good at what it attempts to do. Also, I suspect (though obviously cannot prove) that most people think the LGPL is just the GPL with a linking exception and treat it as such. When you actually read the licence, though, it's very different. However, the number of applications out there licensed under the LGPL (which I think is a nonsense) makes me think I'm right. Aye, the "linking" feature turns out to depend on the linking applications being derived somewhat from the libraries source in able to be link, thus they are derivative works under copyright law. Thanks for your comments Sam

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