On 11/4/07, Demetrios Kyriakis <demetrios.kyriaki..ooglemail.com> wrote:
> if you want a tool
> or GUI use LGLP, if you want
> a general library than use BSD or Apache". I got no explanation why is that
> so (beyond "lawyers found this as the best combination"), but it seems that
> developers apply it :).
My opinion: because people doing commercial work rarely extend a GUI
or tool, but people doing commercial work use libraries all the time.
LGPL's viral nature is rarely conducive to commercial work, where the
companies you are working for will not give away for free the
application that they paid you to write just because you use a viral
library. Most companies have no issues giving away common library
code, but they're not going to give away the applications that they
pay their programmers to build on top of that library code.
> #4 - on SF unlike Apache.org most people spend no time on licensing
> discussions (nor really do they care)
SF projects, unlike Apache.org projects, disregard licensing
restrictions because following the licensing rules is rarely fun.
While you and others have opinions on what LGPL means when applied to
java code linkage, you have no legal basis for holding such an
opinion. ASF, on the other hand, employs attorneys who do have the
legal basis for determining what the LGPL java linkage licenses mean
and who have discussed the matter with FSF attorneys. Since ASF can
legally be held responsible for breaking such a license, ASF takes
licensing quite seriously. ASF has financial assets. It's
unlikely that YourGUIToolApp developers have any assets worth
pursuing. But if your YourGUIToolApp ever becomes valuable enough,
then it might be a different story.
Note that I am not an attorney. Nor do I have anything other than
opinions (without legal basis) on the subject of licenses. If you
want to discuss it with people who do, use the talk-legal mailing list
at apache. You and I can debate it, but it won't accomplish anything.
All we can say is that we follow the Apache rules at Apache Cayenne,
and give you pointers to what those rules are. There's nothing
useful accomplished by talking about how you wish the rules were
different on our mailing lists -- use the legal mailing lists.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Sun Nov 04 2007 - 15:43:28 EST