Re: [Bitpim-devel] Licensing (again :-)

[Stephen W. <sa...@us...>]

V2.0 looks basically OK, but what is the point of section 8.  It seems
to say that if you embed the software (bitpim) in your own application
and hide it really well, then the license basically no longer applies. 
You can charge whatever you want, not give out source code, not report
modification back to the authors, and not acknowledge the code.  I guess
this neatly deals with the "problem" of embedded device manufacturers
improperly including GPL'd code in their products by just declaring such
inclusion.  Since my contribution to BitPim (drivers for some phones) is
a likely target for embedding in other applicaitons, I am not entirely
happy with this.  I would prefer someone embedding my code to either
acknowledge my code (the dreaded BSD advertising clause), or make their
source code open (the viral GPL).

The comment that some 3rd party components would not work if BitPim was
GPL got me looking at the licenses of those components, which brought me
to the wxWidgets license which is basically LGPL, except if you
distribute binary, then do whatever you want.  I guess what that is
saying, is, if you distrubute binaries, do whatever you want but don't
blame the authors, or if you distribute source code, then here are the
rules so that it plays nicely with other free software.

				Stephen