Something from the source : Christian Schoenebeck wrote on 9 Sept 2005:
"Anyway, about the mentioned commercial exception in general: you can assume all current tarball releases of LS (up to and including 0.3.3) to be under pure GPL. It was already released as pure GPL and is already included in many distributions as pure GPL software, so don't worry about that.
However we thought about changing the license in future to one which is more restrictive about commercial usage and we already placed those commercial exception notes just to be sure.
The idea about such a possible new license was to allow "direct" commercial usage of LS only if the commercial actor supported this or another (important) open source project either directly by contributing code or indirectly by funding the respective project. So somebody who supported e.g. the GCC, ALSA or Jack Audio Connection Kit project might also be allowed to use LS commercially. "Commercial usage" would of course only mean products based on LS, it would of course not mean using LS e.g. for commercial music production or something. Such a license wouldn't mean anything negative for the user, but might "motivate" or force ;) more people to contribute to this or another open source project, so personally I would find such a license more beneficial (than GPL for example) for the open source community in general.
Unfortunately I haven't found an existing open source license which would reflect those restrictions. Some even said this wouldn't be an open source license according to definitions of XY, but personally I think it would. So maybe we would have to write a new license, like a "Participation License" or something which might also be used by other projects in future of course.
Best, dp
