On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 10:26:58AM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote: > I figure there's people here that can help point me to good resources. > > I've read LGPL and GPL and the "why not use LGPL" page[1]. Still, I'm not that clear in > simple terms what is allowed. And also how BSD or Apache or Artistic compare. Quick summary, since I can't think of any pages that are sufficiently unbiased right now ;^). IANAL, IANAA, IANAVC, etc. * GPL says you can use this source, but all derived works must be distributable under the terms of the GPL; not necessarily explicitly under the GPL, but you must have all the rights it enumerates. The FSF pages do a far better job explaining the GPL than I ever could. * The LGPL is the same as the GPL, but explicitly allows you to link things together. So someone could take your library and link against it, and sell the combined work under a proprietary license. They are still required to credit you, though, and any changes they make to libswish-e itself must be made available under the LGPL. Point 3 of the LGPL gives people the right to (optionally) take the code under the original GPL, so people can continue to use it exactly as they have in the past. * The BSD license (the modern, 3-clause one, anyway) says "do what you want with this, but a) don't remove our copyright from the source, b) mention in the documentation or about box or whatever that you got the code from us, and c) since you modified it, you can't claim we endorse you or your product." This is a very liberal license; people can (and often do) embed your code in their proprietary software, and they don't have to contribute fixes or improvements back to you. Of course, some do, out of the kindness of their heart. Apple, for instance has released Darwin, the unixy underpinnings of Mac OS X under a BSD-ish license, even they the original license of the BSD code they used did not require it. * The Apache license is very similar to the BSD one, but it requires you to rename modified works, which takes the no-endorsement clause (c) of the BSD license to the next level, I guess. * The artistic license is a funny one, since there are a few different versions around. If you're considering it, make sure you use the 'Clarified Artistic License', since the original has some issues (which the FSF discusses on their page). A lot of stuff under the Artistic license is dual-Artistic/GPL-licensed to that everyone can stay happy :) All five of theses license are available on any Debian system for the reading, in /usr/share/common-licenses/. > Specifically, this is for swish-e, which is a search engine. The swish-e source is built > into a C library, and also into a binary program "swish-e" that is a small front-end to the > library. Currently it's all GPL. > > People have been asking for different licensing -- I guess they want to include a search > engine in their proprietary products. For some it's just a matter of providing a search to > their included documentation. For others it's perhaps more integrated with their product. > > I'm not clear if there's a difference if they have their program run the swish-e binary vs. > linking directly with the swish-e C library. I frankly don't see any difference there. This is where it gets hazy. The general argument seems to be about whether designing their program to use yours (say, by calling it from within their program, with fixed, no-modifiable arguments) is different to linking, and thus a derived work...This is something you need to decide yourself, I guess...It's never been tested in court, as far as I know. Searching the debian-legal archives will uncover lots of interesting cases along these lines. So, in the end, you have to decide how much control you want. Some possible solutions: 1) Leave it under the GPL. People can call the command line program, but not link to it from non-GPL-compatible software. GPL-compatible software can link to it just fine. As an option to consider, you can license the software to people who ask under a traditional you-give-me-cash-and-I-let-you-use-my-code, or even let them use it for free, if you so desire. 2) License libswish-e under the LGPL, and (optionally, depending on how much you care) leave the frontend under the GPL. Anyone can use libswish-e in their software as a search engine, but they have to give back the modifications to libswish-e itself to their customers, and presumably the world. 3) BSD/Apache/Artistic-license the whole thing. Anyone can take your code and embed it into their own, without giving back changes, or even really telling you they've done so. They can of course choose to give hunks back, but they're not required to. Just to emphasise: any sort of license change, including re-licensing it under a proprietary license to some people requires the consent of ALL the copyright holders. If this is a project that only you work on, then it'll be fine. If other people have contributed 'non-trivial' (which is, of course, something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis) amounts of work, then you need to get them to agree, too. This is a huge issue for large projects; Mozilla is trying to relicense nearly all of Moz under a triple GPL/MPL/LGPL license, and they *still* (after over a year) can't find everyone... > I'm also not clear if their use of Swish-e (linked with libswish-e or just running the > binary swish-e) effects their software's license. GPL talks about "derivative" works which > I'm not sure how to define. Programs that include GPL code, including those that just link it in, are generally considered to be derived works, and thus subject to the terms of the GPL, too. Note that the GPL is only a *distribution* license. I'm free to (if I had access to the MS source, at least) link IE with wget (which is under the GPL) and happily run this. The GPL only kicks in if I try to distribute this hunk of code (and would in fact prohibit me from doing so, since the IE license is highly incompatible with the GPL). > I don't want to start a big debate about the details of the licenses. > I'm more interested, in simple terms, in the major differences in > them, and what general restrictions and rights they provide to the > developers and users. Hmm, this turned into a much longer email than I thought it would be; I hope there's some useful information in there. Also try the debian-legal list; it's full of amateur legalicians :) Oh, and: I AM NOT A LAWYER. THE ABOVE IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CONSULT A LAWYER BEFORE DOING LAW-RELATED STUFF. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | http://www.ertius.org/ GPG keys: 1024D/1E73B7CD, 4096R/3ABDE5EC | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: Croatian Janet Reno AUTODIN Roswell security PGP UFO threat
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