OSLib license

[Jonathan Coxhead]

   Tony van der Hoff wrote:

> Remember that at the time the LGPL did not exist, or at best was in its 
> infancy, and this may have possibly been more appropriate. Also, the GPL 
> itself was at v1 at that time. The licence conditions were imposed by 
> Jonathan, and nobody felt the need to question them. I believe he simply 
> picked the GPL because it was well known, available, and he desired to 
> support the general aims of the GNU project. Maybe he'll correct me here.

   No correction needed.

   I had 3 aims:

   ---Support the goals of GNU and the FSF. Richard Stallman is a hero of mine.

   ---Allow (indeed, encourage) as many people to use OSLib as may wish to, both
to save them from the tedium of recreating hundreds of SWI veneers, and to
promote interoperability of RISC O S software.

   ---Think as little as possible about licence agreements. IANAL, and I prefer
to think about other stuff.

   These are in conflict with each other to some extent: the FSF goals prohibit
modification without release back to the community. I thought that was an
untenable restriction, as it would mean Acorn couldn't have used OSLib in RISC
O S itself---which they do (at least in the bits I wrote when I was there).

   And the third conflicts with the other 2 because to work out a clear &
coherent statement would have involved a lot of thinking about legalistic logic.

> There have been a few queries, like yours, and one or two people have 
> positively declined to use OSLib because of the licence conditions.

   I'm unhappy that someone has looked at the licence and concluded it was too
restrictive. If I'd known, I'm sure something could have been worked out.

   It would have been nice if the DeskLib/Desk people had seen in OSLib
something that would have inspired them to use it as the base for their library:
I think they could complement each other nicely. But I don't know them, and I'm
not about to send them unsolicited emails on the subject.

> However, to be honest, I believe it not to be worthwhile doing anything about
> it; certainly any confusion should be cleared up, although I don't fully 
> understand why confusion should arise.

   Well, any suggestions for improvement can be passed over this list, and I'm
sure they can be incorporated into the official licence. At the moment, the
copyright is notionally mine. I think I heard somewhere that if you use
GPL/LGPL, you have to assign copyright to the FSF. I'd be quite happy to do
that, if they have a licence that doesn't burden users in a way that would
discourage them from using the product.

   Or maybe one of the other licences that have proliferated over recent years
would be better? Artistic? BSD? Other ideas?
-- 
... Jonathan
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