All: I'm sure licensing choice for NH is a pretty uninteresting topic <g>, but I've been approached by a potential NH adopter asking if we would ever consider moving from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3 as part of the NH3 release cycle.
As I understand it, the (general) motivator behind creating the LGPLv3 was to provide an LGPL license version that is more compatible with GPLv3-licensed code (e.g., if LGPLv2.1 code is linked into GPLv3 code, there are apparently some potentially contradictory clauses between the LGPLv2.1 and the GPLv3 that would make such a release legally conflicted). The user has pointed out that their legal department has expressed specific concern re: the following text in section 6 of LGPLv2.1: "(...) you may also combine or link a 'work that uses the Library' with the > Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute > that work under terms of your choice, *provided that the terms permit > modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering > for debugging such modifications*." > They have expressed some concern re: the potential ambiguity of the scope of what must be made available for reverse-engineering under this clause, fearing that it might be interpreted as including their own (presumably commercial) solution. They have also noted that this ambiguity appears to have been acknowledged by the LGPL authors as the related phrase has been modified in LGPLv3 to read: > "You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken > together, *effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the > Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging > such modifications *(...)". > I am neither a lawyer nor do I desire to become one so I cannot really offer an opinion re: whether one of these clauses is more or less clear than the other in any meaningful way. But I am wondering if anyone can proffer a compelling reason for us NOT to move to LGPLv3 as part of the NH3 release so that it can be more easily used in concert with GPLv3-based proejcts. What are people's opinions on this? Steve Bohlen [email protected] http://blog.unhandled-exceptions.com http://twitter.com/sbohlen
