Tim Allen wrote:
Kenneth Downs wrote:
GPL is to spread it as far and wide as possible as fast as possible.
LGPL?
My concern would be, I can't use this toolkit for a closed source
application if it is GPL.
That may be your intent (which I actually don't have a business
problem with), I was just curious as to your decision.
If it turns out that nobody can release a closed source app, I will
definitely reconsider and look again at LGPL, but I am not convinced
you cannot do so.
If you seek to provide a closed source app that is built upon
Andromeda, you are required to provide the source code to Andromeda
itself. However, your app is not a derivative work in the strict
sense because your code is not mixed in with mine in any sense. You
never modify a file, and your files and mine are actually in separate
directories.
I greatly appreciate your asking the question though because I'd like
to make sure that people feel safe with the project. My goal is to
provide the freedoms typically associated with the "plain old GPL",
and certainly not to restrict the creation of closed apps. I just
don't want anybody closing *my* app.
Then it sounds like LGPL is exactly what you want. That forbids people
closing your code, but allows linking of it to closed apps. Cf Tom's
comments, it's quite difficult for anyone to release code that depends
on GPL'd code without incurring the terms of the GPL for their code (and
that is clearly the way the FSF want it to be).
But as Joshua was implying, a common business model is to release some
code under GPL, which means it can be used only for GPL'd apps, and then
also be willing to sell other sorts of licences for it to be used with
commercial apps. If that's the sort of business model you have in mind,
then GPL is probably what you want.
We've been through similar discussions recently with our web application server,
Whitebeam (http://www.whitebeam.org).
We'd originally released this under a variant of the Mozilla licence - which I
think is not unlike GPL. We started down that route because we make use of
Mozillas JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey). We did get a number of comments
though, and we never managed to get our licence adopted by the OSS (quite
rightly so!)
The outcome of the discussion was to release the project under a BSD license.
A good deal of the discussion centred around the fact that we make heavy use of
Postgres and so we'd be a much more natural choice of development environment if
we had a similar licence. It helped that the discussions took place during the
uncertaintly around mySQL licensing coupled with Oracles buyout of the innodb
company. The clincher was that Postgres+Whitebeam+Apache (1.3.29 before they
changed their licence) provided a complete BSD based web development
environment. The only external dependancy being SpiderMonkey which we link to
under the LGPL.
My suggestion would be: a) if you want to keep the option of selling/licencing
your code for commercial gain, do something like mySQL and release under GPL
with lots of warnings and offer people a 'commercial' licence; b) if you want to
see your project used in the widest possible audience go with BSD.
The BSD license does allow others to create a closed-source project from your
code - but my view is that isn't too important. You'd be the natural port of
call if they wanted consultancy on how to do that.
Pete
--
http://www.whitebeam.org
http://www.yellowhawk.co.uk
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