Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper License

[Ali A. <ALI...@au...>]

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).

I'm no law expert - but I don't think that would fly in a court (i.e. 
you're not "clean room" and it can be argued that you re-licensed code 
without the AUTHORS permission). Not that I'd sue you or Sun :P
 
> 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?

Well - since gnome-db2html2 is an /application/ and not a library, I have 
an objection to re-licensing it under the LGPL.

Personally though, I have no objection to giving the ScrollKeeper 
explicit permission to use this code under the LGPL in their 'product. 
This is of course based on the assumption that ScrollKeeper is LGPL'd.

I would not want to re-license gnome-db2html2 so companies can use it for 
their own interests, but I do not mind the ScrollKeeper project from 
using it if they wish.

Unfortunately, I can not make this decision alone. jr...@re... is the 
original author or this product so he must be consulted too. Also John 
Fleck has contributed some patches - I wonder if he should be included 
too (his contributions are 'more than 10 lines' (albeit, I haven't 
integrated his patches yet (and I usually modify these patches myself))

Regards,
Ali