[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: LibLouis on google brailleback and braille with IOS accessibility function

  • From: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxx>
  • To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2023 10:00:12 +0100

Hi Michael

You bring up interesting points. Some of which Bert and I have been discussing recently.

On 03.02.23 11:33, Michael Whapples (mwhapples) wrote:

Should the violation relate though to the contributors/developers, then what is the process and who is responsible? As the project has no legal entity is it down to the individual contributors? What if someone brings a claim against the LibLouis project, are individual contributors going to have to fight it and potentially be liable?

If I understand you correctly you are asking if someone could sue the individual developers as there is no legal entity behind liblouis. I'm not a lawyer but as far as I know there is some legalese in the license that states that the developers can not be made liable for any damage when using the software.

Then there was the problem when LGPL V3 had been inserted into a number of LibLouis files and trying to revert back to LGPL V2 was a task as it meant trying to track down all contributors and get approval.

The story was that liblouis was licensed under LGPLv3. Other than the LGPLv2 the version 3 has some obligations regarding patents, see https://fsfe.org/activities/gplv3/patents-and-gplv3.en.html. I don't quite understand the implications, but it seems that for companies with large patent portfolios this must be really scary. So we got approached by Amazon that they'd like to use liblouis in the Kindle and the couldn't because of LGPLv3. They said it would be really nice if we'd move back to  LGPLv2. So, because I'm nice, I contacted everyone to ask for permission. As you can imagine this was a lot of work and we never achieved 100%. As far as I know there are still some tables under LGPLv3, see https://github.com/liblouis/liblouis/issues/26.

In hindsight I'm not so sure I'd do it again because a) it was a lot of work b) as far as I remember I never heard back from them if they really use it now. You think a big corporation should be able to fund such an effort.

These are just some of the issues I feel may be should be addressed, even if it is to clarify in an agreement to contributors what the situation is when they submit contributions.

There are a number of things we could do for sure. An agreement with contributors would be an administrative burden IMHO, we'd have to ask for a signed version of it, we'd have to store them somewhere. At the same time we barely have time to fix bugs in liblouis.

MIchael, if you'd like we could set up a call and discuss these things over the phone.

Thanks

Christian

Michael Whapples

On 03/02/2023 10:11, Bert Frees wrote:
Hi Michael,

    From what I read an LGPL library in a commercial product should
    be possible to replace and relink, in which case Google should
    provide a mechanism for you to do this and then you could use an
    updated LibLouis.


Yes, that is also my understanding. They do violate the license and I've thought about contacting them (and other companies). However I have very little hope that they would take our question into consideration.


Op di 31 jan. 2023 om 09:12 schreef Michael Whapples <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

    I think this is latest OpenSource TalkBack. From what I read it
    seems like Google only publish the source code for major releases
    and the repository I referenced does contain talkback version
    13.0 from 30 Nov 2022. There may have been minor updates released
    on playstore since then.

    Here is a link to the wikipedia page about TalkBack which also
    says that the TalkBack source code is published to that repository.

    If the OpenSource TalkBack is not recent enough, then may be
    there is an option to enforce the LGPL of LibLouis on Google.
    From what I read an LGPL library in a commercial product should
    be possible to replace and relink, in which case Google should
    provide a mechanism for you to do this and then you could use an
    updated LibLouis.

    Here is an article talking about that LGPL feature
    
http://sourceauditor.com/blog/lgpl-v21-and-the-obligation-to-replace-the-library/

    Would be interesting to contact Google and see what their
    response is. If they were to fight you on this, then there is the
    question of whether you would want to get in a legal fight with a
    tech giant.

    Michael Whapples

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