OSLib license

[John Tytgat]

In message <47478D14.7010501 at doves.demon.co.uk>
          Jonathan Coxhead <jonathan at doves.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>    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.

It's good to see this confirmed.

> > 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.

Ok, that's promising.  The reason why I started this topic is that I want to
revive old and unreleased code of mine which is using OSLib and which
probably in first instance won't be released under GPL so I started
wondering if I could proceed with that code base as is or that I had to do
surgery which would be a great shame IMHO.

Personally I think if we can cover the OSLib license intensions outlined
above by one or more known licenses, we better do that instead of trying to
formulate exceptions and let alone only do this in a FAQ.

>    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.

I'm a bit confused why this topic is mentioned (was OSLib license playing
a role in any discussion on DeskLib/Desk vs OSLib in the past ?) but DeskLib
project stored at <URL:http://www.riscos.info/index.php/DeskLib> has
undergone quite some changes by Adam Richardson
Cfr. <URL:http://groups.google.co.uk/group/desklib?hl=en>.

The fact that each library has their own strengths and lucky enough different
ones make it indeed very sensible to let DeskLib become a high level
functionality API making use of OSLib low level API on top of RISC OS.  And
that has been discussed but as this is a major work this could take a while.
Note that this is mentioned in the Roadmap outlined on the DeskLib wiki
page.

> > 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.

For all the code you contributed, most certainly yes.  But as long as other
contributors didn't transfer their copyright to you for their contributions,
they still have their copyright.  I'm not aware of a implicit or explicit
rule in OSLib project that the copyright gets automatically transfered.

> I think I heard somewhere that if you use
> GPL/LGPL, you have to assign copyright to the FSF.

Definately not true but I can guess where that idea comes from : when you
contribute to the GNU projects already owned by FSF, they ask you to
transfer your copyright to them for your contributions so that they remain
full owner of the source code.  The reasoning is that it makes it very
easy to defend any violations of those project in court and to stear the
project towards the future (e.g. go from GPL v2 or later license to GPL v3
or later which happened recently for quite import projects like GCC).

> 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?

When all copyright holders on OSLib agree, they can re-license OSLib under
a different or even more than one license. I think the answer could be in
dual or tri licensing covering the conflicting goals Jonathan outlined
above.  I'm not aware of any authoritive source of dual/triple licensing but
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_license> is rather informative to
me.  Perhaps GPL 2 + LGPL 2.1 + MPL 1.1 tri license like Mozilla/Firefox/
Thunderbird are using ?

Note that MPL 1.1 only OSLib would make it incompatible to link with GPL
work but a GPL + MPL OSLib would be ok (
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> and
<URL:http://www.catb.org/~esr/Licensing-HOWTO.html>).  Both licenses
(including LGPL) require your to make changes to OSLib available to the
parties receiving the binaries which is IMHO a way to make OSLib beter.
It's just a suggestion.

John.
-- 
John Tytgat, in his comfy chair at home                                 BASS
John.Tytgat at aaug.net                             ARM powered, RISC OS driven