[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: License issue
- From: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 16:07:23 +0200
On 05/15/2014 03:43 PM, John Gardner wrote:
Christian, you say you are not a lawyer, and that is unfortunately all that
needs to be said. The big corporate lawyers are terrified of LGPL3 just as
they were terrified of GPL. Which is why we switched from GPL to LGPL. It
does not matter one whit that you or I think LGPL3 is okay.
A problem that we have (legally speaking) is that we would have a very
difficult time to trace all the changes to their originating author. For
example we have tables that were checked in by me or by John that were
authored by somebody that sent in the table via the mailing list we
might be able to track these down). Or there are probably changes that
happened before liblouis was under source control (might be hard to find
because there might be no record of this whatsoever). Since we do not
assign copyright we probably have a bunch of unknown copyright holders.
If we wanted to change the license we'd have to ask all of them which is
near impossible since we do not know them.
The alternative would be to rip out their contribution which is hard
since in some cases we do not even know what they contributed.
We might be able to rip out all the changes since the change to LGPL3
which would be a pitty.
So could we try to convince these big corporate lawyers that LGPL3 isn't
all that bad?
If the big corporations will not use liblouis even though some of us think it
is okay with LGPL3, we are making life difficult for blind people who use their
software.
But what else are these big corporations going to use instead?
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: 28. Juni 2014 von 9 bis 16 Uhr.
Mehr Informationen erhalten Sie unter http://www.sbs.ch/offenetuer
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
Other related posts:
