> I would contact the author and suggest LGPL, which allows you to
> incorporate the LGPL code into commercial applications without affecting
> the commercial app.
Not quite.
You must include any and all copyright notices that appear in the
LGPL code into your use of that code in your project/product. This means
that if you ship MyProgram.zip, with Program.exe in it, you must also
include full copyright notices and the LGPL license text itself, inside
your zipfile as well, if you redistribute it or sell it publically.
The modified work must itself be a software library (2a[1]). This
means you can't take a function from an LGPL piece of code, and include it
in your commercial app, which is shipped as a standalone binary.
There are quite a few other clauses here as well, and I can
personally tell you that there are dozens of companies directly in
violation of the LGPL for their use of LGPL code in commercial products
without following the letter of the license (some investigations are
ongoing for many of them).
There is this growing notion that since "Free Software" is "free"
(as in cost), that means you can do whatever you want with it, and that
couldn't be farther from the truth, when it comes to copyright and use of
licensed code that is Free Software in proprietary/commercial products.
One I know of one[2] example[3] of this misuse we have found,
which happens to be a very popular Palm application. Incidentally, the
company has stopped returning my emails regarding this issue. And to think
they wanted me to sign an NDA to prove that they weren't using our code
(under legal counsul from the FSF, I was advised to sign nothing, since I
was not the accused). How unfortunate that companies behave like this.
I can assure you that the Free Software community takes these
kinds of things very seriously. We're also here as resources to companies
and individuals, should you want to ask how to properly use this kind of
source code in your commercial applications, properly. It can be done, and
it is done in hundreds upon hundreds of commercial software packages,
without the need for "dual-licensing".
Incidentally, "dual licensing" only works if ALL contributors to
the code agree to allow the code to be licensed under a separate license
from the original distributed version. With more and more people providing
patches and fixes and other things to Free Software projects, this becomes
harder and harder to manage successfully.
Contrary to popular myth, if you use code from Free Software in
your commercial products, you do not have to just make it free, or give
the full source code to your entire product suite away at no cost to
anyone who asks for it.
I can see this discussion rapidly digressing into a license war,
so I'll end this part here, but if anyone wants to delve deeper, feel free
to contact me directly, or start up a new thread on it.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
[2] http://lists.pilot-link.org/pipermail/pilot-link-general/2004-April/001774.html
[3] http://lists.pilot-link.org/pipermail/pilot-link-general/2004-April/001775.html
d.
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