[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: License issue
- From: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxx>
- To: "John Gardner" <john.gardner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 11:35:23 +0200
Hi John
"John Gardner" <john.gardner@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> In any case, I have been advised by people who keep better track of
> license terms than I that LGPL#3 is completely unacceptable to
> companies and agencies who need to use liblouis with anything that is
> not open source. They tell me that LGPL#3, as opposed to LGPL#2 and
> 2.1, no longer permits an LGPL-licensed library to be used with
> software that is not open.
I'm not a laywer but I do not think that this is true. The LGPL3 just
like the LGPL2 is a weak copyleft (according to gnu.org and wikipedia)
which means that anyone can "link to the library, and then be
redistributed without the legal requirement for the work to be
distributed under the library's copyleft license" (quoted from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#Strong_and_weak_copyleft).
A benefit of weak copyleft for me is that the contributions that I make
will remain free and accessible to users while they can still be
combined with commercial software.
> There is absolutely nothing clear to me in LGPL#3. I have read over
> that license and frankly I do not understand one word. I encourage any
> of you to try and figure it out. Go to
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
I read it and as I said I'm not a laywer. Presumably "You may convey a
Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together,
effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library
contained in the Combined Work" (section 4 "Combined Works") means that
if you provide the source of liblouis you are free to combine it with
any other work that is under a license of your choice.
> Since the big company lawyers are concerned about #3 and not about #2,
> and since our purpose is to use LGPL for the following reason stated
> in the preamble to LGPL#2 “the Lesser license provides advantages in
> certain special circumstances. For example, on rare occasions, there
> may be a special need to encourage the widest possible use of a
> certain library, so that it becomes a de-facto standard. To achieve
> this, non-free programs must be allowed to use the library.”
I agree with that purpose but I think LGPL3 provides this just as well
as LGPL2.1.
> So LGPL#3 has now been hi-jacked away from that purpose of the LGPL#2,
> and we cannot use it.
Who says that "LGPL#3 has now been hi-jacked away from that purpose"? I
don't see this.
> I have been blissfully unaware, but I have been approached by a major
> company who wants to use liblouis but is unwilling if we are using
> LGPL#3.
I'd like to know more about this and would be happy to work with you to
try to resolve this.
Thanks
Christian
--
Christian Egli
Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland
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