On Monday, December 13, 2010 5:07:52 AM UTC-5, Branko Vukelic wrote: On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 8:00 AM, mdipierro <mdip...@cs.depaul.edu> wrote:
> otherwise (MIT or BSD are possible for third party contributions) 3rd party contributions that were released as MIT or BSD cannot be licensed under LGPL because they're incompatible. e.g., BSD says "shall not place any more limitations yada yada" or something like that, and LGPL does just that: place limitations on what you can do by telling you not to close-source, etc. Hmm, I thought it was just the opposite -- people like MIT/BSD because they don't place any restrictions on how you license a modified/derived work. So, you can take an MIT/BSD licensed program, modify/combine it, and then release the modified/combined version as LGPL, GPL, or even closed source. You can't go the other way, though (i.e., you can't modify/combine a GPL/LGPL program and release it as MIT/BSD). The GNU website lists both the modified BSD and the MIT (Expat) licenses as GPL-compatible (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html). If this isn't the case, then web2py would already be in violation of various contrib licenses, no? > 3) the official web2py binaries for Mac and Windows are freeware There's no need. You just have to point to the source code and you can still distrubite Win/Mac as binary-only even, under LGPL. Yes, I think that's right (if you just "point" to the source rather than actually include it, you might have to make sure you point to the originally distributed version, not just the current version at web2py.com). We might simplify this by (a) including a link to the appropriate source version right in the license document of the binary version, or (b) including a zip file with the source right in the binary version -- so any distribution of the binary version would automatically satisfy the GPL/LGPL license without any further effort by the developer/distributor. > Is this more or less confusing? Yes. It's the nature of the beast. :) Are you saying yes, it's more confusing? Whether or not it's confusing, I think it may be less confusing than the current license because it removes one of the exceptions (for web2py applications) by switching to the LGPL. If we can also remove the binary distribution exception (and rely on the GPL/LGPL provision for binary distribution), it would become simpler still. I guess the only issue is whether people would readily understand that the LGPL wouldn't apply to web2py apps and would allow binary distribution -- you have to read through the license carefully to figure that out (unless you're already familiar with the LGPL). So, if we switch to LGPL, it would probably be worth pointing this out in a FAQ, and maybe even including an explanation with the license, just so it's very clear what is permitted. Anthony
