I am not a lawyer, but I think the different license may be an issue
that we'll need to address, especially with respect to sharing small
blocks of code or patches. i.e. code submitted to the LGPL software may
require the author to resubmit it again to the MIT-licensed software
since we cannot (I don't think) embed LGPL code inside a MIT-licensed
software. AFAIK, using MIT code inside a LGPL package would be fine
since the MIT licesne is more permissive than LGPL.
Once again, I am not a lawyer, but that's definitely one issue that will
need to be dealt with eventually.
For whole libraries, though, I don't think it will be an issue. MIT
licensed software can link with LGPL and vice-versa AFAIK.
Daniel
Paul Spencer wrote:
I can't see the license of MapServer changing (modified MIT X11 I
think) so my guess is that this type of sharing will only happen as the
licenses permit it. The LGPL is certainly less restrictive that the
GPL so libraries of code could probably be shared if they are used as a
whole piece, but copying only some lines of code from the code base
would probably be against the license.
On 30-Nov-05, at 4:59 PM, Attila Csipa wrote:
On Wednesday 30 November 2005 19:27, P Kishor wrote:
It is still not clear what exactly will Autodesk's codebase contribute
to the MapServer codebase, if anything at all. Will it, won't it? Will
it forever be a separate but equal product? Why does it even need the
MapServer foundation?
Daniel wrote:
Some of the benefits of both projects working together will be sharing
of underlying libraries and code. Some obvious ones are the FDO/
OGR/GDAL
data access libs, but there will be more over time.
Withe regard to the licensing issue, I for one would like to hear the
stance
on this, too. You see, the Autodesk product was released under LGPL and
Mapserver under a very different license. Using the _code_ (as in not
whole
libraries) from the autodesk offering would necessitate the change of
Mapserver licensing, or am I wrong on this one ? I'm not sure the
ramifications of this are all that apparent - MapServer had a much
more free
(IIRC BSD style) license. Many of you may not have followed the
discussions
but this is gaining importance as the upcoming GPL v3 has some important
changes wrt web applications.
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