From: Steve B. <sjb...@ai...> - 2003-07-19 14:25:42
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Eero Pajarre wrote: > Bernhard Kaindl wrote: >> I personally like the LGPL for free libraries, be cause I've more more >> excited by "free software"(e.g. Linux Kernel) than a just by >> "open source"(e.g. BSD, X11), but it depends if we want to allow >> closed source commercialisation of freeglut in the future or not. I also prefer LGPL - but freeglut has a particular aim in life - which is to be distributed with Xfree86 (or perhaps Mesa - which would amount to the same thing in the end). Since the X consortium have strict rules about licensing, the ONLY way to have this happen is to license under the Xfree license. Case closed. > It seems to be somewhat common misconception that LGPL requires > "licensing source code back to the project". (At least I have > seen John also saying something like that). In fact (but IANAL) > it requires distributing the source code to only those people > who otherwise receive the software from you. You are also not > allowed to restrict the rights (including redistribution) of > those other people. It is in no way guaranteed that improvements > would appear in the main distributions. No - but if you do distribute it to more than a VERY small set of people (since they are at liberty to redistribute your sources under GPL/LGPL) the odds are good that the code will 'escape' and can be merged into the main distro if it's worth having. I have actually done this - at work, we've made modifications to my 'exposer' program and (for reasons I'm not going into) NOT released the changes back into the public version. Since the only people who use the modded version work for the same company, it's not likely that any of them are going to release the changes. What GPL/LGPL does do is to prevent people from making a much better closed derivative version and selling it everywhere - knocking the original version out of common use and effectively closing what would otherwise be an OpenSourced product. That COULD happen to freeglut. But it's something we have to live with if we want it to become popular because hardly anyone will toss out GLUT and download freeglut. It has to be bundled with either Mesa or Xfree so that it becomes the de-facto standard. > If implemented literally and with bad intentions this could lead > to a horrible mess of different code variations floating around. That can still happen under GPL/LGPL. I can add a bunch of new code to a package and release it on my own web site - forking the code base to the point where it's almost impossible to pull it back together again. This happened with The GIMP (which is under GPL). A bunch of people in the movie business needed support for more than 24 bits per pixel and because the main GIMP people were ambivelant about adding it, they forked the code into "FilmGIMP" - now, a year or two down the road, the GIMP people want to support >24 bit - but the differences between GIMP and FilmGIMP are now too profound to allow the projects to be merged. The fork is now permenant - which is a terrible thing because all the effort that is going into FilmGIMP that's paid for by big business is not advancing GIMP in the slightest - and all the talented and enthusiastic GIMP people are adding tons of cool stuff that FilmGIMP won't have. Forking is evil - but GPL and LGPL don't prevent it from happening. > If on the other hand the participating people are nice, other > licenses like Xfree or MIT will achieve the same positive effects > of commutinity development IMHO. Exactly. > Also it is a fact that there are people who would drop using > freeglut immediatelly if it would be available only under LGPL, > and the community would lose their (perhaps small) contributions > to the project. I doubt *that*. It would be quite hard to put together a working system that could run freeglut without using at least *some* LGPL'ed code. What is might do would be to scare off some potential developers... but I don't see that as a problem. ---------------------------- Steve Baker ------------------------- HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...> WorkEmail: <sj...@li...> HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- GCS d-- s:+ a+ C++++$ UL+++$ P--- L++++$ E--- W+++ N o+ K? w--- !O M- V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++ -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK----- |