[Plib-devel] License change.

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Dave has been in touch with the Free Software Foundation asking their advice
about the status of LGPL licensing for end-user products like games consoles,
cell-phones, etc.

As a result of those discussions, I intend to amend the PLIB licensing
arrangements by adding to the LGPL as follows:

   "This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 
    under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by 
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at 
    your option) any later version. 

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but 
    WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of 
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU 
    General Public License for more details. 

    You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License 
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 
    Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA 

|   As a special exception Steve Baker gives permission to link these
|   libraries with proprietary software and distribute the resulting
|   executable without including that proprietary code in any distribution
|   as the LGPL would normally dictate.
|
|   This exception is ONLY granted in the case of an embedded system in
|   which there is no possibility of an end user re-linking or recompiling
|   against new versions of this library that may appear in the future."

If anyone who has contributed to PLIB wishes to object to this license change,
please state that objection (and list the approximate sections of code that
apply) within 30 days and I will rewrite those sections as necessary so that
this change may be made cleanly.  Failure to respond within 30 days will be
taken as an agreement to transfer copyright ownership of your changes to
myself so that I may make the license change.

If anyone wants to suggest changes to the detailed wording, please do so within
7 days.

Notice that this explicitly DOES NOT permit console developers to change PLIB
without releasing those changes back into the public domain - however it does allow
them to implement a proprietary (closed source) interface layer between PLIB
and the target libraries (that are typically under NDA).  In that way, no NDA'd
information needs to be published and we can all be kept happy.

For developers of applications on 'normal' computers, this represents no
change to the normal LGPL restrictions.

IMHO, nobody should reasonably object to this change since the new definition
states that the modification of the license only applies to systems where it
makes no sense to retain the LGPL provision to allow end-users to relink
against new PLIB versions.

You can't re-link programs on a games console - so it makes no sense to require
application developers to abide by that rule.

However we *do* still get the benefits of any enhancements and bug fixes
to PLIB - which IMHO is the main reason for using LGPL in the first place.

What we gain from this change is that more people will use PLIB and hence
we'll get more creative input - and that's a straight win.

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>
              WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net