OsLib licence

[Jonathan Coxhead]

   There was no LGPL then (or at least, I didn't know about it if there was). 
That's the whole of the reason.

   I support Richard Stallman's philosophy and goals, but I wanted OSLib to 
useful for everyone, including people who develop software commercially. As you 
probably know, the GPL is "infectious": if you link to a library that falls 
under the GPL, you have to put your code under the GPL. Some parts of RISC O S 
use OSLib, so that's clearly not acceptable. The LGPL does not have that 
problem, as I understand it, so if we want to put OSLib under LGPL, that's 
probably easier.

   But I've never actually read the LGPL, so my understanding of that may be 
wrong. I am not a lawyer, and I have no interest whatever in that side of the 
industry. I just like to write software, and for it to be useful and good.

   So, if someone has a solid proposal for a change here, let's hear it!

   On 11 Feb 2003, at 19:52, Tom Hughes wrote:

> In message <19bf22c34b.colin at colin/granville.gmx.co.uk> you wrote:
> 
> > I've been looking into oslib and am totally confused by your GPL
> > with exclusion clause.
> 
> Right... I didn't think it was that complicated...
> 
> > As I understand it any modifying/copying/distributing of oslib are
> > under the GPL but using it is not.
> 
> That;s right.
> 
> > What I don't understand is how you can say that. As I see it,
> > although you say oslib is copyright Jonathon Coxhead (JC) is this
> > strictly true?
> > 
> >    * JC released the software under GPL with the exclusion clause
> >      for using it. This made all files at that point copyright JC
> >      and include the exclusion clause. Having released oslib under
> >      GPL JC can only add exclusions to the GPL to files for which
> >      he has copyright
> 
> All true.
> 
> >    * At this point other people (including you) added files to
> >      oslib. These files are copyright the person who wrote them,
> >      not JC or you for that matter, and would be added to oslib
> >      under the terms of the GPL. So unless they explicitly licenced
> >      their files otherwise their files are GPL'd without the
> >      exclusion clause.
> 
> Certainly anything that I have added can be assumed to have the same
> licence as the rest of OSLib. I would guess that the same is true of
> Tony but you'd have to check with him.
> 
> In addition I would expect that anybody who submitted code to OSLib
> would expect it to be released subject to the same licence conditions
> as the rest of the library. That's what I assume when I submit code
> to an open source project anyway.
> 
> We should probably make that rather more clear - to be honest I don't
> think there is much that came from anybody other than me or Tony at
> the moment. A few patches, but not many whole files.
> 
> >    * To the user this now means that the whole of oslib is GPL'd so
> >      the user must release the source code, though they can extract
> >      the files covered by the exclusion clause and just recompile a
> >      version of oslib using them.
> 
> See above.
> 
> > Are you *absolutely* sure that the exclusion clause applies to the
> > whole of oslib ie that all the contributors have agreed to it?
> 
> Well we haven't made them sign legal documents or anything, but then
> neither do 99.99% of open source projects.
> 
> > I can't understand why oslib was released with GPL. The exclusion is
> > an attempt to get around the source code distribution requirements
> > of GPL - I'm not certain it succeeds and this ambiguity makes it
> > useless for me. As the GPL would allows me to distribute a subset
> > of oslib I can't see any benefit in using a modified GPL version
> > over say a BSD licence but I dare say you have your reasons.
> 
> That's a question for Jonathan I'm afraid - the licence was his
> choice.

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