Re: FLTK? (OT: licenses)

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 02:44:14AM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> The LGPL will prevent you from ever using the library on a proprietary
> system.  This includes all major gaming consoles, which is an important
> target that anyone with hopes of selling their game project needs to
> remember.  The LGPL requires that end users be able to re-link the LGPL
> portion into the final program, and you're prohibited from doing that
> on all of the major consoles.  (Since Lua is commonly used in games, I
> think this is relevant.)

Yes, the LGPL is very badly designed. But the concept seems a good
one. If we assume that the goal is to allow the software to 'be the
best it can be', i.e. to be available to the most people and also to
have the most contributors, then we desire both to encourage commercial
use and to ensure that those commercial users still contribute back
their improvements. Consequently, I am now in favour of MPL-style
licensing for most purposes.

The rule is basically that you are free to include MPLed code in a
larger commercial work, but you must contribute back changes to the
specific files that make up the original MPLed work. So, it's (weakly)
copyleft, but not viral. A company that really wanted to could
probably find loopholes (e.g. maintain their changes as patches that
are only applied at build time?), but it seems likely that few would
find that desirable or legally safe.

The MPL also has a few flaws though for use on projects other than
Mozilla, e.g. it requires that litigation take place in Santa Clara
(since that's where Netscape is based). So, rather surprisingly, what
I consider to be the best license I have found was actually penned
fairly recently by people at Sun Microsystems. It's called the CDDL
and is essentially the MPL with various flaws fixed. More information
at http://www.sun.com/cddl/.

-- Jamie Webb