Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Hmm, what license to use?

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 3:12 AM, Jeremy O'Donoghue < jeremy.odonoghue@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:54:34 -0400, "Stefan Monnier" said:

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I am not allowed to use such an interpretation. The (expensive and very carefully researched) legal advice used to shape the use of Open Source code at my employer has resulted in a "no LGPL under any circumstances whatsoever" policy. [...] That still leaves anyone free to use LGPL if they want to, but please don't assume that it allows commercial use by all potential users.

It *does* allow commercial use. Your example just shows that some people may decide not to take advantage of it, based not on problematic restrictions but just on paranoia.

The LGPL does not state that a "work that uses the library" may be distributed in conjunction with a closed source commercial program, although I grant that many (presumably including some who have actually consulted lawyers) believe that such an interpretation is reasonable.

I believe the LGPL states that mere aggregation doesn't indicate derivative works. In fact commercial video games have been distributed for linux that used the SDL library that I used to work with myself in a former life. So I think we should all speak to our lawyers before assuming how it can be used. The GPL and LGPL are needlessly difficult for mere mortals to understand in their entirety, and as you've alluded to, many lawyers would interpret it differently. I suspect many different judges would too.

However, the policy in place in my workplace was designed by lawyers familiar with contract law in multiple jurisdictions worldwide. I may not personally agree with their conclusions in every respect, but I'd be hard pressed to consider them "paranoid" - they are simply doing their job, and have concluded that the potential risk of a court somewhere in the World taking an aggressive view of the provisions of clause 5 is unacceptable.

I guess what I really mean is that if you choose LGPL as a license, some people who would like to use it in commercial products will do so, but others (who would have chosen to use the work if differently licensed) will not. Not a question of paranoia so much as corporate appetite for license risk.

Yes, there's enough anti-GPL or GPL derived momentum in many places that I must say that using the LGPL or GPL would be highly frowned upon at my workplace as well. That said, I'm a huge fan of apache, BSD, MIT and Perl's licenses :-)

Regards Jeremy -- Jeremy O'Donoghue jeremy.odonoghue@gmail.com

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