The main advantage of a license like GPL or LGPL is that any changes must be contributed back to the community. Imo, this is fair enough; if someone benefits from your code, it's reasonable to ask that they give back if they enhance it in some way. Of course, the disadvantage is that using it in many other products becomes very difficult.
It might be worth considering the Mozilla Public License, which is not quite as restrictive but still encourages improvements to be contributed back. In overly simplified terms, it operates on a file level. If you make changes to a file under MPL, you must license your changes under MPL, but any other files in your project do not have to comply with the MPL.
Disclaimer: I actually don't know a huge amount about MPL, but I've been looking into it recently.
Jamie On 28/10/2013 10:15 PM, Michael Whapples wrote:
I think the reasons for why LGPL is not desired has already been said. Whether one agrees with those reasons may be another matter as some of it relates to peoples' perception of the LGPL so some might not see that as an issue or may tackle it another way (eg. changing perceptions). As for opening a can of worms by saying so much, I fear you might have opened it and hopefully the lid can be put back on before it gets out of hand. Just to say people have differing oppinions, you have voiced your dislike for Apple's practices, I feel GPL restrictions stink just as much and while one is not prepared to compromise no progress will be made and users will be the loosers as open source options will not be possible. One cannot criticise Apple for protecting their interests if you then want to protect your own. Michael Whapples On 28/10/2013 11:44, Christian Egli wrote:"John J. Boyer" <john.boyer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:We need to free ourselves of the LGPL.Why?This probably means that we can't use any of the existing code.Yes.Whether it applies to the concepts behind that code I don't know.No, the concepts are not bound by copyright AFAIK. That would probably be patents, but IANAL.The license should be a permissive one, like Apache 2.0. Although the software will be open source, it should be copyrighted by an organization that can take action if someone violates the license.But why would you need that? The Apache 2.0 license is so permissive that it is basically "do whatever you want". The only restrictions are that you cannot use the trademark and you cannot hold the creators of liblouis liable. There are hardly any ways to violate this, so IMHO there is no need for an organization. But I guess I'm starting a bike shedding thread about the license of the new liblouis, so I'll shut up now. Thanks ChristianFor a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
-- James Teh Director, NV Access Limited Ph + 61 7 5667 8372 www.nvaccess.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NVAccess Twitter: @nvaccess For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go to http://www.abilitiessoft.com
