On Dec 1, 3:58 pm, Joe Simms <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All
>
> I am having lengthy discussions with one of my clients about
> Licensing, you're all jealous aren't you!!!
>
> They are fully aware that i am using symfony, and as it is a small
> project and we have no formal contract in place, i have agreed to
> release my code under the MIT license as well, purely for ease and
> the lack of guarantee / warranty attached.
>
> They are however questioning the fact that symfony is combined with
> LGPL licensed software (Propel, Creole), and that this will affect
> their ability to sell the business / website in the future, as they
> have been told by someone "really clever" that open source software
> is BAD when it comes to this!!!
>
> As far as i understand, LGPL allows you to combine it with other
> compatible licenses (MIT, BSD etc), add your own code and resell and
> re-license as proprietary software, and even distribute as closed
> source, however, if you ever make any changes to the core files
> distributed under LGPL, you must make them available as LGPL.
> Therefore, i cannot see how this will affect their ability to sell
> the business / website in the future, just that they will have an
> obligation to share any modifications made to the LGPL libraries with
> the open source community. I think it is fair to say that LGPL is
> more there to protect the open source project from being hijacked by
> some big multinational and making everyone pay for it, other than
> that its a pretty flexible license i think, or is it!!!!
They would have to put their modified(!) code under the LGPL if they
made modifications to propel or creole itself, which is never necessary
given that both are modular and flexible enough to allow extensions
without having to patch core files.
Also, LGPL and MIT are not really "compatible" in that you can mix them
including modifications. You can, however, use the bundled LGPL library
freely as long as you give proper credit (which symfony does not do,
see below). This is what the LGPL license refers to as "linking", it
applies to all PHP code since you include the library to use
dynamically there. In a nutshell, you can use and sell software that
uses LGPL libraries as long as you don't modify the library itself,
which means you can subclass it and modify it's behavior this way. This
is precisely what symfony does in case of the propel data model
builders, for instance. Of course, the code produced by the propel
generator is YOURS and you can do with it whatever you like.
>
> Has anyone had issues like this before, or can someone point to some
> resource i can show my clients, or anything that will help me bring
> this damn issue to an end.
>
> I think that as symfony bundles these projects by default, it should
> explain this more clearly, as initially i thought the entire
> framework was MIT, including third party libs, but obviously that is
> not the case as Propel and Creole are LGPL. This should be made
> clearer IMHO. Also if the plugin policy is MIT only, then technically
> Propel could never be an official plugin, ouch!!!
Yes, I wish that would be made clearer. In fact, I get the impression
that many users believe Propel and Creole are symfony sub-projects,
since nowhere does it clearly state the origin of Propel and Creole -
which is just one of many of symfony's unfortunate license violations
:(
> I think Propel were considering releasing 2.0 as MIT, and i asked the
> project lead for Doctrine if they would release as MIT, but not too
> sure they liked the idea as it lacks protection. Having had this
> conversation with my client, it has become a bit of an issue for me,
> and i think that as symfony is becoming a player in the framework
> arena it may be able to request that these libraries be released
> under MIT for official integration with 1.0, but that maybe pushing
> our luck and not possible.
That's not going to happen in case of Propel and Creole, sorry.
Cheers,
David
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