Re: [Vxl-maintainers] module licensing issues

[Ian S. <ian...@st...>]

On 20/02/2010 02:08, Ricardo Fabbri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently had to remove offending LGPL-derived code from VXL.
> However, a couple of people seem to be needing the code.
> In principle, I could generate a new library within contrib/brl with
> just that code, and license only that library as LGPL.
> Would that be OK?
>
> Ricardo
>

For a definitive answer you would need to ask a lawyer about that, and 
possibly every maintainer of VXL would need to get their own lawyer's 
opinion.

As this is impractical, I guess I could be convinced by a document 
containing the full LGPL and an intermingled commentary. The commentary 
would need to describe how each term is either irrelevant, or handled 
acceptably.

I'm not trying to be obstructive here, but as I understand the basic 
rules of thumb of these licenses you cannot take GPL or LGPL code and 
then redistribute it under a BSD-similar license. If I'm wrong, I'd be 
grateful for an decent explanation of why.

Another alternative is to release your library entirely separately from 
VXL. Then there isn't an issue.

Regards,
Ian.