Re: L-GPL or BSD license for MCF libraries ?

Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier.. I got a bit bogged down in my own UCI
stuff for a while..

Steve said:
> This is not a problem for any commercial product, they just need to give a
> link t our website and they are compliant (as long as they don't make
> modifications to the library).

This is not correct.  (for those interested in quick reference to the actual
text of the LGPL, a copy can be found at
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-license.php )

Any use of the MCF library in an application which is not GPL or LGPL licensed
falls under section 6 of the LGPL license.  That section has several
problematic clauses:

  6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a
  "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing
  portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice,
  provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's
  own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.

This, for a start, will prevent adoption by most commercial application
vendors.  Almost no commercial licenses ever permit modification in any form,
and most commercial developers are extremely loathe to grant such freedoms to
their users (even if they are technically required to under most copyright laws
anyway)..

According to section 6, anyone using the MCF libraries must also do one of the
following (the following are paraphrased, but correspond basically with 6a and
6b of the license text):

  a) Include the complete source code of the MCF library, along with object
     files for the application suitable for relinking with a modified form of
     the MCF library (or provide an offer to easily obtain such materials, or
     make them downloadable from the same place, etc)

Most commercial developers will probably not be willing to distribute MCF
source code at all, let alone supply object modules for their own code suitable
for relinking.

  b) Use a dynamic-linking mechanism with a copy of the library "already
     present on the user's computer system" (this is rather vague, but implies
     that the library cannot be distributed along with the package but must be
     installed separately by the user)

Requiring users to download and install MCF libraries separately is not
particularly attractive for commercial products which users want to open the
box for, stick in the CD, and have just work.  It's fairly unlikely most
commercial developers would want to choose this option, as it potentially makes
their product significantly harder to install and use than their competition's
might be.

There is nothing in section 6 which permits anybody to "just give a link to our
website" to satisfy it.  Doing so would not come close to bringing them into
compliance with the LGPL's terms.

The LGPL really wasn't intended to address things like MCF's intended
(wide-ranging) audience.. it was mainly done as the minimum number of changes
to GPL terms to allow collaboration with some other non-GPL open-source
projects.  It does make things significantly easier for other open-source
licenses to work with than the GPL would, but the LGPL still contains a fair
amount of the "proprietary is evil" mentality which can be problematic for most
non-open-source software developers.

-alex


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