[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: License issue
- From: "John Gardner" <john.gardner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 08:09:15 -0700
Hi Michael. The initial copyright was held jointly by John Boyer's company and
ViewPlus. If we had formed a non-profit consortium at the time, we would have
required that copyrights be held by that organization. It may be too late to
ask for copyright relinquishment at this date. But if we can finally return
the license to LGPL2, we should agree that no change will be made to the
license without serious consultation with corporation lawyers who might have to
defend it in court.
John G
consortium.
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Michael
Whapples (Redacted sender "mwhapples@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 7:57 AM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: License issue
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
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
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