Greetings
I have discovered a serious issue with the licensing scheme of PicoGui:
PicoGui is distributed under the LGPL. But many of the files in the
distribution are copyrighted by a developer or entity and are licensed
under the GPL.
Anything that's released under the LGPL can be freely re-distributed
under the GPL; the inverse, however, is not true. From what I can tell,
the entire project may not, at this time, be distributed. PicoGUI needs
to be released under the GPL or corrected in some other way.
Looking at the directory structure:
server --> has GPL files, builds an independent application
client --> has GPL files, different client stubs provided for building
independent applications
tools --> has GPL files, (what do they do? how are they distributed?)
apps --> has GPL files, different independent apps are built
Given the above, distributing PicoGui under the LGPL is incorrect. Doing
so violates the GPL and therefore you lose the right to use the GPL
software.
This is a significant risk for all users of PicoGUI. When a software
developer sees an LGPL project, he would understand that he could link
his proprietary program to it, dynamically, and have no problem.
However, if the "LGPL" library really has GPL bits in it, it's no longer
valid to call it LGPL, and its distribution is illegal. Any company who
has already integrated LGPL has a problem, at this point in time.
It would be great if the development team would rectify this situation
in some manner or another; here are some ideas:
- make a 0.46.1 release, change all LGPL files and notices to GPL, and
change the project page on sourceforge, etc, to say "GPL".
- remove all the GPL pieces (either newly write them, or persuade the
copyright holder to distribute the file to you under the LGPL)
- put a big note on the web page that says, "this may not be distributed
due to open source licensing issues" and removing all files from the
download area
In any case, the last point above should be executed, because it should
be made clear to all users that the 0.46 release may not be distributed.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Benjamin Collar
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