Re: Artistic and LGPL compatibility in jar files
On Dec 12, 2009, at 11:12 PM, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
> I may (well) be wrong, but I've always understood the INTENT of the artistic licence to be "BSD plus a trademark licence".
It has some clauses which are decidedly non-BSD-ish. See for example section (8) of the Artistic License 2.0.
It is more meant to keep control over what it means to, say, "be perl", which is not simply a trademark issue.
> But, if the JUMBO/CML people are happy, why not ask them to add an extra permission, or dual-licence. If they are the copyright holders (and therefore able to change the licence from Artistic to Artistic 2), they could always change the licence to "Artistic 1 or LGPL2.1" if they wanted.
*nods head*
That's a couple of the possibilities I mentioned to them, and I assume they are considering the options. They do want to use the license to include trademark restrictions. I've explained how that doesn't work in practice. I don't think that made me new friends.
> I'm always wary of explicitly relicencing. The GPL doesn't permit it, and by doing so you are taking away user rights.
Well, the GPL does allow relicensing to newer versions of the GPL...
> If you're distributing JUMBO/CML code *unchanged*, what I'd do is to keep it separate inside the package (in its own directory or something), and in the CDK documentation state that you are distributing JUMBO/CML under the LGPL as permitted by 4(c)(ii) of the Artistic licence.
It a patched version. It also turns out that CDK wasn't distributing the patched source code as per the Artistic License requirements, but that's being addressed as part of this license cleanup. (There were other problems we've found, like some of the LGPL packages not listing in the documentation all of the third-party LGPL'ed components they were using and including. This has triggered a long-needed review of what's going into the distributions.)
Thank you for your time, and best regards!
Andrew
dalke@dalkescientific.com
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