Re: FLTK? (OT: licenses)

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

Hats off and special thanks to Mutt for sending instead of postponing
an incomplete first-draft message that I hadn't even decided whether
to finish yet.  Feel free to disregard.

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 03:59:17PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 06:32:01PM +0100, Jamie Webb wrote:
> > 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)
> 
> I don't want to force people to give me stuff they don't want to, because
> frankly, if someone doesn't *want* to contribute, I don't want to deal
> with them in the first place.  
> 
> > 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/.
> 
> Another thing I like about the X11 license is its simplicity.  This
> license is pages long, and would probably 
> 
> > 
> > -- Jamie Webb
> 
> -- 
> Glenn Maynard

-- 
Glenn Maynard