[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Licensing of liblouis tools and xml2brl
- From: Neil Soiffer <neil.soiffer@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:54:37 -0700
In general, I would like to see the tools have as loose a license as
possible. In cases where you are using GPL code, you're stuck with making
them GPL. GPL vs more open licenses such as BSD is a "religious" debate and
I prefer BSD because it has fewer restrictions and is thus much clearer
about what can be done. But as I said, you'll get strong advocates on the
other side of the issue. Since liblouis is lgpl, the person who does the
work/writes the tools gets to set the terms, not the library writer. If you
consider it a group effort, that's when the discussion can get heated.
FYI: a couple of years ago we wrote a COM wrapper for liblious so that it
could be more easily used by tools that needed a MathML-to-math braille code
translator, but didn't want to lock/link themselves to a specific translator
or specific release of the translator. The COM wrapper has gone stale and
needs updating (any takers?), but I don't want that to be GPL. I'm not even
sure whether COM components are considered eligible for LGPL or not (they
may or may not be loaded into the address space of a process). I've always
been a fan of NewSpeak when it comes to software licenses: "less is more".
Neil
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Samuel Thibault <
samuel.thibault@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Christian Egli, le Thu 01 Oct 2009 10:53:33 +0200, a écrit :
> > This implies that we need to relicense the tools (and only the tools)
> > under the GPL. So to that effect I have asked the copyright holder John
> > Boyer and John Gardner for permission to change the license of the
> > tools.
>
> Well, strictly speaking, although it's clearly a good thing to ask
> authors and users, LGPL can be casted into GPL without notice, as
> explicited in LPGL:
>
> “3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public
> License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. [...]”
>
> In the case of brltty, we did the converse: libbrlapi got turned into
> LGPL, which required consent from the authors. Brltty remained GPL.
>
> Samuel
> For a description of the software and to download it go to
> http://www.jjb-software.com
>
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