[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: License issue
- From: "Michael Whapples" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "mwhapples@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 15:56:34 +0100
On 15/05/2014 15:07, Christian Egli wrote:
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.
This is why some projects ask that contributions have the copyright
assigned to the project, it simplifies this sort of thing as the project
then is the copyright holder for the whole code.
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?
May be some commercial offering which they are convinced paying a wodge
of money for is going to be cheaper/less bother due to its legal
certainty rather than something they have legal concerns over. Having a
poke about in MacOSX it appears that Apple have chosen to use a
commercial offering if the notice in their translation table is anything
to go by.
May be the other option is that they decide Braille is too much bother
for them to want to deal with and so Braille gets left out and the
Braille user looses.
Thanks
Christian
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
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