[Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper License

[laszlo k. <las...@Su...>]

Hi,

It seems to be a problem (to me at least) what the Scrollkeeper license
is going to be. We talked with Dan about this a bit and LGPL seemed
better than GPL as Scrollkeeper might be used by proprietary help
browsers as well. When I started developing the code that I used to
extract the Table Of Contents from Docbook files I looked at
gnome-db2html in Nuatilus because there is a similar functionality
there. I took that code, removed everything I didnt need and added new
functionality. What I essentially kept from that code was how to use the
SAX interface of libxml. If I copyright my code to people who developed
gnome-db2html then my understanding is that Scrollkeeper has to be GPL
as gnome-db2html is also GPL. 

Another option is to not copyright to gnome-db2html authors, but mention
them in the THANKS file, this way the license could be LGPL. This could
be backed up by the fact that there is only one way to use the SAX
interface anyway and I happened to learn that from GPL code. To be
mentioned that I also kept the stack based approach of the
implementation (Ali would know what I am talking about).

Or maybe there are other licensing issues to be considered or I just
dont see the whole picture.

The reason I am raising this is that my understanding is that once the
code is made public under GPL, this can not be changed so we probably
need to clarify the license before that.

What do people think?

Laszlo