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Hello Jérôme,Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this. Guys often see the problem, that someone might come and overtake their business by taking their source and start a new project. Since I am not a lawyer and not in publisher-scene working - I won't say, my thoughts are best at all. But I studied open source licenses and stuff for about 2 years.
But LGPL 'advertises' with the "release-but-with-source-of-what-you-changed"-thing, so that even if somebody uses your source and makes his own (maybe commercial project) - he'll have to give it to you, and you can add it to your own prject. Sounds not that bad at all, does it?
Of course releasing the source of modifications, is an issue for some. But for some library creators it secures that external patches are made and applied.
My opinion is, that packages (like the lua-one) should have enough plugin/module features, so that you don't need to change the source of the package - only if you find a bug or add an feature. Then why not sharing this fix with the community? Thatswhy I am very happy, that LUA has (even its not LGPL) so much powerpatches for most needed things available!
I am looking forward to see luaODE released. As long as it one of the license Jérôme said, I'll be able to use them well.
Kind regards, Jan (DracoBlue) Jérôme VUARAND schrieb:
2007/2/22, Wesley Smith <wesley.hoke@gmail.com>:ODE is actually dual licensed LGPL/BSD. I don't think Lua actually has a license. May I ask what issies you see with LGPL?For example if I want to use your Lua/ODE binding in my commercial application, but need to modify it to better fit my application engine code, I would have to redistribute the source code of my modifications. That's not the case with BSD/MIT licence. I can sell a customized version of Lua while keeping my modifications closed-source. The BSD vs. GPL licence argument is almost as old as open source. It always amaze me that it's the GPL camp that pretends to be the defenders of freedom (and it upsets my french genes when they use the term "libre") while they have one of the most restrictive open source licences. But anyway it's your right to choose LGPL for your work. However keep in mind that it won't reach as wide an audience as Lua and ODE do. For example Lua and ODE are commonly used in commercial games, but anything with the letters GPL near it will be banned by any big enough game publisher to avoid any legal risk (I work for one of these, and I already have a hard time promoting Lua with its permissive licence).