Licence question

SDL Development
1

i want to release some personal work on sourceforge under BSD licence.
i want to link this work SDL library
can i kept BSD licence ? or must i migrate to GPL/LGPLP licence ?

i prefer BSD licence for 3 reason:

  1. it seems it is the prefered one for big compagny (Apple,
    Microsoft,…)
  2. this is the simpliest, shorter (by far), easier to understand
  3. this is the one which let the most liberty to user… just kept a
    licence text with the name of original author.

i see on LGPL i must give access to source code, but i even never
build/read it personaly ! would it be sufficient to have a SDL licence
text in my project giving relevant URL ?

2

Hi Lloyd,

To answer your question, the Berkeley license is generally considered
compatible with GPL as long as you remove the advertising clause.

In general a license is compatible with GPL if the software could be
redistributed under a GPL license without violating any of the
provisions of the original license.

However, I’d like you to reconsider your ideas about GPL. The GNU
license builds a community of free software developers over time
whereas BSD is subject to abuse. While Apple and Microsoft may
prefer BSD, the companies that are really helping the open source
community by contributing their code back to the common good; companies
like Redhat, VA Linux, SuSE, Ximian, all predominantly use GPL.

Also there are several large companies willing to work with GPL,
including IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. The difference is whether you
want to exploit the code, or help build it.

Cheers,
-klsOn Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 03:31:06AM +0200, Lloyd Dupont wrote:

i want to release some personal work on sourceforge under BSD licence.
i want to link this work SDL library
can i kept BSD licence ? or must i migrate to GPL/LGPLP licence ?

i prefer BSD licence for 3 reason:

  1. it seems it is the prefered one for big compagny (Apple,
    Microsoft,…)
  2. this is the simpliest, shorter (by far), easier to understand
  3. this is the one which let the most liberty to user… just kept a
    licence text with the name of original author.

i see on LGPL i must give access to source code, but i even never
build/read it personaly ! would it be sufficient to have a SDL licence
text in my project giving relevant URL ?

SDL mailing list
SDL at libsdl.org
http://www.libsdl.org/mailman/listinfo/sdl

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// .–=,
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:’’’/__ // / // |_// // || .’~. .~`,
kls _/-=_/

3

i want to release some personal work on sourceforge under BSD licence.
i want to link this work SDL library
can i kept BSD licence ? or must i migrate to GPL/LGPLP licence ?

That’s fine, just link with SDL dynamically and there’s no problem.

See ya,
-Sam Lantinga, Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment

4

kevin at ank.com wrote:

To answer your question, the Berkeley license is generally considered
compatible with GPL as long as you remove the advertising clause.

That’s true for GPL - but we have luck and SDL is given to us under
the Lesser-GPL restriction - which are usually easy, especially here.
With LGPL, any license is compatible as long as dynamic linking is
used (or just use the prelinked trick if there is a strong need, like
the target system has no dynamic linking).

As to the remark of having a license that big companies may like, and
the bits about the advertisement clause - I like to put new software
of mine under a dual license, BSD/LGPL where the BSD-ish variant does
include an advertisement clause. So, either the company gives away
the changes they made to the lib (and only the lib - that’s LGPL)
or they shall add a hint whose code they used to make money from.

cheers,
– guido Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut
GCS/E/S/P C++$++++ ULHS L++w- N++@ d(±) s+a- r+@>+++ y++ 5++X- (geekcode)