Re: [Opensync-devel] libsynthesis and vformats

[Lukas Z. <lu...@pl...>]

Hello Michael,

On Jan 8, 2011, at 15:33 , Michael Banck wrote:

>> The thing is, there's simply no money except our own (2 people)
>> funding our work in libsynthesis, so we need the closed derived work
>> (products we sell) to keep it going. 
> 
> AFAICT, the public part of libsynthesis is LGPL, right?  Does it have an
> "or later" clause for the versioning of the license?

Presently it is dual licensed under LGPL 2.1 and 3.0

> In any case, having it LGPL should make it possible to develop and sell
> proprietary products on top of libsynthesis, as long as you don't need
> to modify libsynthesis itself for it.

Except that for iOS, which happens to be the source of funding for my work on libsynthesis, that does not work, because iOS apps need to be statically linked with all libraries (except those provided by the system).

>> That's why we have the contributor agreement. Without it, we cannot
>> use contributions to libsynthesis ourselves which would essentially
>> split the project into a internal and a public version. We'll not do
>> that with the version we provide the infastructure for, but of course
>> anyone who feels too much restrained by a contributor agreement could
>> start maintaining a separate fork.
> 
> There's a couple of things you could do (or maybe you did already, I did
> not check your contributor agreement) to make libsynthesis more
> appealing to external developers:
> 
> 1. You could relicense it to BSD.  That would allow you to use your
> modified version of the code (plus any external future contributions) in
> proprietary products.  Of course, it would allow the same to possible
> competitors, not sure you have any.  In that case, you could drop the
> contributor agreement.

True, but quite a big risk to take. I've invested 10 years into this and didn't get a single penny funding except for selling products based on this code, in a narrow niche.

> 2. Relicense the code to say "LGPL 2.1 or later".  That would remove
> potential concerns that in the future libsynthesis will be incompatible
> with LGPLv4 libraries, if a new version of the LGPL gets released ever.

Worth considering, sure, but it does not solve the problem that we still need a contributor agreement.

> 2. If not already the case, you could modify the contributor agreement
> to guarantee the free software community that the public version of the
> code will always be in the spirit of the LGPL as published by the Free
> Software Foundation.

Our CA is a almost 1:1 copy of the SCA (Sun, for OpenOffice), and states that "Any contribution we make available under any license will also be made available under a suitable FSF (Free Software Foundation) or OSI (Open Source Initiative) approved license".

Best Regards,

Lukas Zeller