OSLib license

[John-Mark Bell]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:52:04 +0000, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk>
wrote:
> 
> Jonathan Coxhead wrote:
>> John Tytgat wrote:
>> > 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 ?
>>
>> Multiple licensing sounds like a complicated solution to this problem.
>> What do you think of the MIT licence?
> 
> I don't think mulitple licenses are complicated, and it lets the
> licensee pick the license most suitable for their purposes and their
> ideals.

Surely all that is needed here is a clarification of the existing licensing
arrangement, rather than a wholesale licence change? GPL + a linking
exception is a pretty well-understood phenomenon, so shouldn't cause any
great difficulties. Here's some examples:

http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/guile/guile-core/LICENSE?revision=1.2&root=guile&view=markup
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html

(note that guile's licence has since been changed to LGPL)

To some extent, this approach is less restrictive than LGPL might be --
there's no requirement to distribute your software in object form to permit
relinking against newer versions of the library by end-users, for example.

John.