Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper License

[Dan M. <d-...@uc...>]

Another solution would be to contact the original authors of the borrowed
code and get their approval to relicense these sections under LGPL. (If we
keep any non-trivial code, we pretty much have to do this if we want
ScrollKeeper under LGPL.)  I am cc'ing Jonathan and Ali, who I believe are
the only two copyright holders on toc-elements.c.

Dan

On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, laszlo kovacs wrote:

> 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