Gang, Another case of licensing has emerged in our internal discussions; LGPL.
LGPL is essentially a response from Free Software Foundation to compete in 'commerce friendly' licensing. It is not nearly as 'liberal' as the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses, but a hell lot better than GPL and, God forbid, Affero GPL. Now, The Apache Software Foundation has practically ruled out Apache projects to use LGPL codebase, not even as a binary dependency. See http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html. The main reason being that LGPL imposes restrictions on larger works. For instance, for a closed-source product to use LGPL code its license must allow reverse-engineering. So, what does this got to do with Qi4j? We already have the entitystore-neo4j module, which in itself is Apache licensed, but whomever downloads the AGPLv3 licensed Neo4j which it depends on, is not allowed to combine Neo4j, entitystore-neo4j and Qi4j application for use by anyone by him/herself (excl web apps for instances), without violating the AGPL. (For clarity, said person can purchase a commercial license with other terms.) In fact, one could argue that running the entity-store testcases is already a violation, since Maven will do the download and there is combined work that is not AGPL licensed. So, you can see that this case is somewhat complicated already. If we are to allow this, and hence similar licensing scenarios, we may create a complicated mess for downstream users. On the other hand, by excluding such possibilities we will limit our options and some things that we might want to do becomes too hard and won't be done at all. What I would like to hear is the views and opinions of all the lurkers on this list. There is >100 of you, so I hope to get some constructive feedback on how to balance this. Should we disallow it? Should we separate legally entangled stuff onto a SourceForge project? Should we just document it and put up a big sign of warnig, if so how is that 'sign' going to work? Are there other solutions? Cheers Niclas _______________________________________________ qi4j-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ops4j.org/mailman/listinfo/qi4j-dev
