Re: [CLucene-dev] Re: license (clarification)

[Max K. <ma...@to...>]

Hi Rob,
I am not a legalist, but after looking at lgpl it appears that any source
modifications have to be published, too. That's the part that is not good
for a proprietary project. Apache has no such restictions.


On 4 Jul 2003, Rob Ristroph wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
>         I just joined the mailing list, however I have read all the
>         messages in the archives.
> 
>         I had a few comments about licenses; but I want to preface
>         them by saying that the clucene developers can expect me to
>         work on clucene regardless of whether it is under the GPL,
>         LGPL, BSD or Apache licenses.
> 
>         First, I am unsure of why Max Khesin thinks the LGPL is
>         incompatible with a proprietary product in a way that the
>         Apache license isn't.  Both licenses would require that you do
>         something when distributing a proprietary program that used
>         CLucene.  The Apache requires that notices appear in the
>         proprietary software, the LGPL requires the receiver of the
>         proprietary software be able to get the source code to
>         CLucene.  Personally, I think placing as zip file of CLucene
>         source on a CD or web page is less burdensome than cluttering
>         up my "About" sceen.  Would the names "Apache" and "Apache
>         Software Foundation" be replaced with Ben van Klinkehn ?
> 
>         Some licenses allow the switching later on to others, such as
>         the latest BSD licensed software can be re-licensed as GPL (or
>         practically anything), and LGPL can be re-licensed as GPL, but
>         since Apache requires that notice it can't be switched to GPL
>         or LGPL later.
> 
>         You can offer the software under all three choices, at the
>         user's discretion.  This is called "dual licensing" or
>         "multiple licensing."
> 
>         Someone made reference to the original writers of Lucene and
>         their intentions.  When a piece of software code is re-written
>         completely, so that you change every single line, which is
>         what you do in switching languages, it is a new copyrightable
>         work not a derived work of the previous.  (This is a grand
>         simplification, of course, and there are surely exceptions.)
>         An example is the Berkeley group that took AT&T Unix and
>         re-worked it until it was the separate work of BSD Unix.
>         Sometimes people are confused about this issue and think they
>         can't own code they have written while having someone else's
>         example in front of them, because they have heard discussions
>         of "clean room programming" and "virgin programmers" (virgin
>         programmers are so inexperienced they are known never to have
>         studied common examples).  The issues of clean room and virgin
>         refer to trade secrets and whether reverse engineering was
>         used, not copyrights.  We should be grateful to the Apache
>         group for saving us from all that by making their work Free
>         Software.
> 
>         In any case, the original Lucene and the Apache project is
>         focused on code meant to be run on a server, and most ordinary
>         users of the code don't have it on their computers; while
>         CLucene, being a simple library not in Java, is well suited to
>         being used in applications distributed everywhere.  Users of
>         software via a server don't have much freedom to modify the
>         code anyway, and the people running the server are more likely
>         to be in a corporation, so the two environments naturally lead
>         to different outlooks on licenses.
> 
>         This message is long because I wanted to get all my license
>         opinions into one message.  My future emails will be about
>         using and modifying CLucene :)
> 
> --Rob
> 
> 
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