Dear Joerg, thank you for your helpful comments.
On Thu, 17 Feb 2022 at 22:09, Joerg Sonnenberger <jo...@bec.de> wrote: > Since the USA joined the Berne convention, explicit > copyright claims are practically irrevelant and the actual changes > matter. As such, you have to ask anyone who has contributed a > non-trivial patch. > Good to know. > > Posting a patch doesn't make it public domain, but they can be trivial > enough to not be copyrightable. Part of the problem is that a single > patch can be trivial, but they can accumulate. IANAL, but the general > guide lines given are ~7 lines of non-mechanical changes. But that can > vary depending on the nature of the change as well, i.e. how complicated > it is. > Agreed. > > Why is this not a blocker for going forward? > > Wouldn't linking against libidn make the resulting library effectively > > be under LGPL too? > > Only if you statically link. Statically linking is important enough nowadays for reasons that go beyond performance, for example ease of deployment and encapsulation. Encapsulation is often a requirement of certain security certifications. Of course one could statically link open source code without too much value added, or "hide" to some extent a 3d party dependency, but that's actually allowed by LGPL providing source/object code is disclosed (at request) and notice is included (LGPL <= 2.1, at least). > That's exactly why I consider this whole > relicensing exercise overkill, I didn't dare to ask Dominik more than a re-licensing to MPL 2.0, that is still a copyleft license and keeps the spirt of LGPL but makes it more business friendly. A lot of software decided to re/dual-license to MPL for the reasons I argued about, for example cairo[1], which is dual licensed LGPL 2.1/MPL 1.1. Moving to MPL2 would be implicitly LGPL compatible, so no need for dual licensing (that's one of the reasons why MPL2.0 was created, according to the FAQ[2]). There's a trend in having more code licensed to permissive licenses such as MIT and Apache 2.0. It would be great to know what Dominik had in mind when he chose LGPL back in 2006 and why he chose LGPL 2.0 instead of LGPL 2.1 (which is a less ambiguous license and was published in 1999). If he agrees on relaxing PoDoFo licensing terms then he may as well tell us what he thinks about more permissive licenses. > even if I would certainly approve of the > result. > That's good to know. Cheers, Francesco [1] https://www.cairographics.org/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/ _______________________________________________ Podofo-users mailing list Podofo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/podofo-users
