On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 6:45 PM, Andy Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > It depends on what you want to do with it.
Personally, I was looking at some of the older versions of programs that are now AGPL licensed and trying to compare pros and cons of using the latest version versus an older version pre-AGPL. The older version license terms may be more lenient but older versions may have more vulnerabilities unless someone else is maintaining it. Also, newer versions of software may have more features. Using GPL is typically not an issue unless you start thinking about distribution. If I just want to share the source with people who can build things from source, I don't think it's a real problem. However, if I build a nice program I want to share and I want to package or share it with people who may not know how to build it themselves, then I have to start dealing with sharing the program source code, patches, plus source for all dependencies (plus those patches). There's a system library exception in the GPL that might partially limit the source dependencies one needs to share. Not sure how that would apply with a system like Linux from Scratch where everything is already built from source. AGPL seems even more restrictive than GPL regarding use/distribution. At present, I've been investigating mupdf and its various license incarnations. Here's the GPL2 version of mupdf: https://github.com/technosaurus/mupdf-GPL2 There are some other GPL2 versions of software at https://github.com/technosaurus/ Thought some of the comments on GPL2 mentioned here were interesting: https://github.com/lastgplv2/lastgplv2.org/issues/1 I've seen several copies of mupdf that are still at GPL 3 (before the switch to the Affero GPL license) on github. I can get mupdf (an older GPL 3 version) working with the latest versions of third party libraries. Also, if I use the last GPL 3 version (with some patching), it should theoretically be a more stable API than the AGPL version. I've had to patch pdftxt which uses the mupdf library just to get it to compile every time a new version of mupdf has come out. When I want to adopt other tools that use the mupdf library as a backend and when they don't have a very active developer base, I'll probably have to patch them every time the API changes as well. Plus, I don't require as many library dependencies on my system with the older version (which is a definite plus), but it won't have the same functionality either. So, I'm trying to weigh the benefits of which to build from source/maintain/use on my desktop. I've reverted to a few older, more lenient licenses for applications that don't have active support any more and didn't have any interesting new features in the last version. Wondering if it would pay to do that with an actively developed project if I don't plan on using the latest enhancements. It would be nice to find an actively maintained alternative, but so far the only real alternatives I've been able to find for the mupdf library are poppler and xpdf. From what I've read, neither is as efficient as mupdf. Was curious about what other users who build applications from source did in situations like these. It's difficult to find forums/mailing lists (besides this one) where users actually build their own programs from source rather than just using what someone else provides for them. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-chat FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
