[Haskell-cafe] Re: base-4 + gtk2hs-0.10.0 licensing

[John A. De Goes]

The Mozilla Public License is superior to LGPL for this purpose: it  
still forces you to release any modifications, while clearly allowing  
bundling and commercial sales of software that includes MPL code.

MPL is a good fit if you want to ensure improvements get contributed  
back to the community, but don't want to discourage commercial uses of  
the software.

So if you've released LGPL software, please consider re-licensing it  
as MPL. Companies don't go near LGPL, except (in rare instances) for  
dynamically linked libraries (but many companies won't even do that).

Regards,

John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration

http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101

On Feb 26, 2009, at 1:17 AM, Ketil Malde wrote:

> Peter Hercek <phercek at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> Relinking against newer Gtk2Hs versions might not work.
>
> You have the option of recompiling the new Gtk2Hs with the old GHC and
> relinking, don't you?
>
>>> I want to repeat what I’ve said earlier on this list: For Haskell,
>>> there is no real difference between LGPL and GPL, as far as I
>>> understand it.
>
>> Of course there is a difference and a *significant* one.
>>
>> * A GPL library will force commercial users of the library to release
>> their code under GPL.
>>
>> * An LGPL library will force commercial users to release their source
>> code only to the users of their program (which already bought it) and
>> only for the purpose of recompiling with a newer version of the LGPL
>> library.
>
>> Am I missing something?
>
> Yes.  At least in my jurisdiction, the *intent* of the licensing
> matters.  I think it is fair to say that the intent of the LGPL is
> maintaned as long as you redistribute any modifications you make to
> the LGPL library.
>
> An easy thing to do here would be to get a written statement from the
> author about the interpretation with regard to what you intend to do -
> like Duncan posted.
>
>>> If you don’t want to force the users of your library to use an open
>>> source license for their work then use BSD3 or a similar license
>>> for your library
>
> There is also a rather significant difference for open source software
> - if I use BSD, somebody might modify and ship closed versions of my
> library.  If I use LGPL, somebody can combine it with other open
> source code, with licenses that may not be GPL-compatible.  So I
> believe LGPL is less "viral" than GPL.
>
> This is just opinion, but if you wanted guarantees, you'd talk to a
> lawyer, and not post on a mailing list.
>
> -k
> -- 
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of  
> giants
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