[brailleblaster] Re: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Changing the license of liblouisutdml to Apache 2.0

From: "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2012 12:24:39 -0500
Hi Christian,

Ok. No license change. Thanks for the explanation. This isn't the first 
of my wild ideas to which you have brought a whiff of sanity.

John

On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 02:30:05PM +0200, Christian Egli wrote:
> "John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > ViewPlus Technologies and Abilitiessoft are thinking of changing the 
> > license of liblouisutdml from LGPL to Apache 2.0, the same license we 
> > use for BrailleBlaster. This will make it more widely usable. Does 
> > anyone have comments?
> 
> First off: why? What are you going to gain? LGPL is already very
> liberal. Is this supposed to help with the Apple app store issue?
> 
> Generally there are a number of social and technical problems with this:
> 
> 1. All copyright holders need to agree with this. This includes the
> people that changed liblouisutdml but also the people that changed
> liblouisxml (on which liblouisutdml is based). That would be John,
> Eitan, James, Bert, Michael Whapples and me. You need to track down
> these people and ask them. If they do not agree you will have to take
> their code out. As for me I would not be very happy with such a change
> (the reasons are explained below for those who are really interested).
> 
> 2. We use code which is licensed LGPL and which is written by other
> people. Namely the handling of options in xml2brl is based on GNU
> getopts. I guess you could rip that code out and go back to hand crafted
> option parsing. I think there is other stuff to do with getting the
> version number. This was all done to support standard options handling
> so we could generate man pages. Generally all the stuff that uses gnulib
> would have to be changed to go back to coding it ourselves.
> 
> So, why I like the LGPL better than the Apache 2.0 license? Generally
> the LGPL is a copyleft license which means that we offer the right to
> distribute copies and modified versions of liblouisutdml and requiring
> that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of it (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). Also LGPL is a "weak copyleft"
> license which means (quote from wikipedia):
> 
> "Weak copyleft" licenses are generally used for the creation of software
> libraries, to allow other software to link to the library, and then be
> redistributed without the legal requirement for the work to be
> distributed under the library's copyleft license. Only changes to the
> weak copylefted software itself become subject to the copyleft
> provisions of such a license, not changes to the software that links to
> it. This allows programs of any license to be compiled and linked
> against copylefted libraries and then redistributed without any
> re-licensing required.
> 
> Apache license on the other hand is not copyleft or in the words of
> wikipedia "permissive". It only requires preservation of the copyright
> notice and disclaimer. Basically you can do almost whatever you like
> with the code, i.e. the sweat that I put into it.
> 
> This is not true to my personal intentions. I want that the rights I
> give to users of liblouisxml to be preserved in modified versions of
> liblouisxml.
> 
> Thanks
> Christian
> 
> -- 
> Christian Egli
> Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
> Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland
> 
> -----
> Tag der offenen Tuer 
> Die SBS laedt Sie herzlich ein: 30. Juni 2012 von 9 bis 16 Uhr. 
> Mehr Informationen erhalten Sie unter www.sbs.ch/offenetuer

-- 
John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer
Abilitiessoft, Inc.
http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Madison, Wisconsin USA
Developing software for people with disabilities
[brailleblaster] Re: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Changing the license of liblouisutdml to Apache 2.0

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