On Sat, 17 Mar 2007, DJ Delorie wrote: > >Personally, I'm not interested in non-free files or "getting something >back". As long as nobody's trying to make money by licensing my work >to others, I'm OK with it. The tricky part here is protecing the >freedom of the files when they're in a distributable state >(schematics, .pcb files, since symbols/footprints can be extracted), >but permitting commercial use when they're not (gerbers, boards).
Ok, so why don't we apply an exception in the following way: "all data is under the LGPL as long as they are in machine-readable source format. In other formats the producer of the other format may freely pick the licensing terms of the combined work." This means as long as you have them in files (you are distributing them, embedding them in a .pcb/.sch) they are LGPL, so they are not affecting the license of the .pcb/.sch) but as soon as someone prints or manufactures the board, he can use a different license. This "machine-readable source" may seem a bit hard to define, but actually GPL itself contains this term as well. However, the above idea has at least the following pitfalls: - the actual producer who does the final conversion from machine-readable source to a board is the fab house, not the designer of the board; but is gerber a machgine-readable source format or rather something like an object? I would vote for the latter, in which case it's no problem. Same applies to PS (so not the actual printing would drop the original license but exporting to PS) - LGPL requires the separation of the LGPL library from the rest of the code (like you still can not copy code from an LGPL library source to a propietary program source, but for example you can dynamic link them). As far as I understand, the goal here is that allow the user to replace the library _easily_. It's true with an .sch if LGPL symbols are not embedded, but I think it's not the case with a .pcb; or is there a way to have non-embedded footprints? - Defining the machine-readable and/or non-machine-readable file formats would probably kill the "elegance" of this solution; maybe the simplest way would be to define a few format (gerber, PS, PNG?) as non-machine-readable and allowing any other formats converted from these to be also non-machine-readable. This means once you export the stuff in a "printing format", it doesn't have to be LGPL anymore, even if it's in a file, whatever else you do with it later. This may leave a nasty backdoor for footprints: draw a schematic with all the footprints on it, convert it to gerber, then it will lose the license, then convert it back with a script (I think it's possible without losing too much important information). just an idea... _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
