On Mon, 21 Feb 2022 at 08:53, zyx <z...@gmx.us> wrote: > > On Sun, 2022-02-20 at 22:04 +0100, Francesco Pretto wrote: > > Also there's a licensing problem: tools (and tests) are GPL. > > This basically makes sourcing code from them into the library > > impossible > > I do not think so.
Maybe I was not clear enough, I will make an example. Some time ago I wanted to make a text extraction API: I looked at podofotxtextract[1] but tools are GPL so I could not just copy from there. Luckily enough podofotxtextract was quite simplistic/limited, but the point is clear: if I want to make turn a tool into an API, for the benefit of everybody, I can not because that would be move GPL into LGPL which is license incompatible (the other way is fine). > It's very common to have different parts of the code > base licensed under different terms. There's nothing wrong about that. There's nothing wrong, but this doesn't mean it's always convenient. For example test code: they are just snippets of code mostly using PoDoFo library in the right way. What's the rationale of enforcing copyleft (GPL) for such code? From my point of view, such code should be to most permissive license as possible, to the point of marking it clearly "public domain", so everybody just feel free to verbatim copy from it. > It's not only about the code, for example the user documentation is > under different license than the source code itself. Sure. But documentation is often licensed in different terms because source code license terms mostly don't apply with the nature of documentation. [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/podofo/code/HEAD/tree/podofo/trunk/tools/podofotxtextract/TextExtractor.cpp _______________________________________________ Podofo-users mailing list Podofo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/podofo-users
