Guido Draheim wrote:
That’s one way of approaching the problem. As for SDL, people could contact
their lawyer about Sam’s statement, since a public connotation is as
good as a formal clarification in most cases, as long as it would seem to the
reader that he speaks in the name of (all/the) copyright holder.
I checked with our legal consultant before starting this thread. The
problem comes from, as you point out, Sam not holding 100% of the
copyright for material under the LGPL, but also from the end of his
statement, which reminds the user that if they do it, they are still in
violation of the license. The analogy I got was, “I don’t care if you
come onto my property, but keep in mind it’s trespassing.” If you were
to go to court for trespassing, you could say the owner gave you
permission to enter his property, but the owner would be able to say he
clearly told you it was trespassing. It doesn’t matter who would win
the argument, you’re already in court on something gray- which means
expensive.
btw, what about doing a formal clarification that a development kit is fine
when speaking about the runtime target platform free usage? That would
not include static linking with third party closed libraries or
something like
that, just the system compiler stuff needed to fill in the relink
clause. Would
that be sufficient for you?
Unfortunately not- some of the embedded systems don’t support dynamic
linking. And some, like Intent and some of the Java-based RTEs, do
other things that violate the LGPL. If the FSF were willing to update
the GPL, all existing code would be grandfathered in, but looking at the
Java communities’ efforts with the FSF, it probably won’t happen.
(stuff about the MPL license)
The MPL license solves some of the modern problems that the GPL/LGPL
doesn’t address. It’s more in line with how I think about usage of my
software that’s open-source. What I use for my apps/libs is generally
based on the zlib/libpng license with a couple extra restrictions and a
faq attached. Not saying MPL/zlib is “right” and the GPL is in any way
"wrong", just that it’s my personal option, and I certainly respect how
other authors allow their code out for public use.
-Pat