On 2013.04.15 11:33, Toby Gray wrote: > I was more concerned about following the rules of the LGPL than stopping > people from 'accidentally' assuming the libraries are in the public domain.
Well, what would be that rule of the LGPL be for then, if not for trying to make sure that people don't run away with whatever is being distributed and assume/pretend they can do whatever they please with it? That's really the whole point of wanting to include a verbatim copy of the license. Ergo, the only reason you can have for making sure that people have a copy of the license is to not offer them a "legal" way to break the terms of the license. Well, IMO, this is bullshit, since if someone is going to use the lack of a verbatim copy of the license with a distributable as an excuse to break its terms, when, in 2013, it is extraordinarily simple to get a copy of it online (and if you're involved in legal dealings, you probably own a smartphone that can get you the full license at any time), then that person is a either a moron or worse, a legal drone with whom there's probably no reasoning to be had. The FSF think it's worth wasting time time with such people. I simply don't. So even if the LGPL states it, it doesn't make much sense to me to bother. > My concern is that section 1 of the license for libusbx says: " and > distribute a copy of this License along with the Library" Oh, you can go much more explicit than that. Right after section 6, the LGPL v2.1 states: "You must supply a copy of this License." Can't be any clearer than that. It's not even a "should" (followed by an "if not", which you conveniently left out) but a "must". And yet I'm still not personally gonna give a second thought about breaking this specific rule, when I see convenience and confusion-avoidance largely trumping it, especially if only legal people and/or wrongdoers would ever use the lack of supplied license as an excuse to bypass its terms. Heck, legal people are usually the first to state that you're supposed to know the law of your country, if you happen to break it. Does your country ship an up to date version of the full content of the law, on regular basis, for each citizen to peruse? > The text in libusb.h is not the full license and explicitly says that a > copy of the LGPL should have come with the library: "You should have > received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this > library" > >> Likewise, we provide the source for the samples, along with the >> binaries, so it's _EASY_ to find out what their licensing terms actually >> are. >> >> It's 2013. Not having an explicit COPYING file in every last >> distributable, when the license name is mentioned all over the place >> and/or can EASILY be obtained online, has ceased to be the end of the >> (legal) world. > > I'm too paranoid about legal matters to be able to agree with that > statement. That'll be your downfall my friend: Those who don't question rules are bound to end up imprisoned by them. This being said, I can understand that you may have you hands tied by your legal department. > However I > don't want to upload pre-built WinCE binaries without a copy of the LGPL > in the zip. Are you happy for me to continue to include COPYING in the > WinCE zips that I upload? Absolutely. I'm just stating what I'll do (or won't do) in the distributable I maintain, but I'm not gonna prevent anybody who want to waste their time trying to play into a supposedly rigid set of rules to send patches, as long as: 1. they require zero maintenance from me (or better, are handled by somebody who actually believes it's worth doing) 2. they aren't going to confuse our users (by multiplying the COPYING files into the root directory for instance, and leave people trying to infer the license from these rather than the source) If you can satisfy 1 & 2, since I explained that I don't want to care about this crap, and send a patch, I'll have no quibble applying it. Regards, /Pete PS: For the record, we only have a copy of the LGPL in the source tarball, whereas we also provide GPL sources there for fxload (and the GPL v2.1 states the same thing as LGPL in terms of license inclusion). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Precog is a next-generation analytics platform capable of advanced analytics on semi-structured data. The platform includes APIs for building apps and a phenomenal toolset for data science. Developers can use our toolset for easy data analysis & visualization. Get a free account! http://www2.precog.com/precogplatform/slashdotnewsletter _______________________________________________ libusbx-devel mailing list libusbx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/libusbx-devel
