Hi John,
2009/7/31 John Schneiderman <joh...@meent.biz>
> There's some debate here where I work about moving forward with the
> PyKaraoke
> project. At this time nothing has been decided or set in stone. We want to
> open up communications to see if our goals fit the community. We are
> looking
> for a karaoke player that we can use in a professional capacity. To that
> end,
> we have contributed several enhancements and bug fixes to this project. The
> two major concerns we have are the usage of the LGPL for the GUI code, and
> the lack of modularity in the overall architecture. The issue with the GUI
> code being LGPL is the possibility of the company's work being used against
> it to be built into a larger system. Though this was a concern even in the
> beginning, it is increasingly becoming a sore spot as each new enhancement
> is
> given. The other issue is the architecture of the system. It appears to be
> more and more fragile with each new enhancement. The possible corrections
> for
> this are to re-write/re-design the architecture itself. Once again, let me
> say nothing has been decided. We actively wish to discuss these concerns
> and
> see if any possible solutions can be made to address them.
>
Interesting question. From the start I always intended for PyKaraoke to be
usable in commercial projects. To that end I deliberately avoided GPL to
remove any restrictions / concerns that commercial projects may have about
whether they are free to use it. Rather than go with a BSD-style license,
however, I settled on LGPL so that anyone could use it within their products
but any changes to the core code should be submitted back. Essentially I'm
happy for people to use it in any kind of product, but I'd like to encourage
people to submit back improvements for everyone else's benefit.
My concern about the GPL is that this discourages people from using
PyKaraoke as the underlying playback library in their products when I am not
interested in forcing people to release all of the rest of their source code
just because they combine it with PyKaraoke. Using LGPL restricts the burden
of sending code back to only the PyKaraoke code itself.
However I can see that there may be an argument for not applying the same
license to the GUI itself. While I think the above is a sensible approach
for the CDG, KAR etc playback modules it might not necessarily make sense
for the GUI. So I am not against applying the GPL to the GUI, but I wanted
to let you know my original thoughts from a few years back when I started
the project and to gauge general opinion as well. If anyone has any opinion
on this then please let us know.
Regards,
Kelvin.
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