Re: forwarded message from Richard Stallman

becka@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de
Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:32:45 +0100 (MET)

Hi !

> Andy> GNU licensing is a good thing. It keeps things free. But
> Andy> enforcing it is not good. We would be closing out some
> Andy> possible customers as well as programmers.

> Note that the licensing issue is independent of whether SANE is a GNU
> program or not. I'm sure FSF has no problem with the API being public
> domain and the "relaxed GPL" is something that the FSF itself proposed
> to facilitate building commercial programs with GNU libraries.

Oh - then I assume its legal.

> Andy> IMHO making the license LGPL should be safer ...

> Have you _read_ the LGPL? It's much more restrictive than the relaxed
> GPL. IIRC, it doesn't permit static linking. This is the reason the
> relaxed GPL was invented.

Yes. Far too often. LGPL isn't good either. If the relaxed GPL is legal,
what seems to be the case, it is of course _much_ better than LGPL.
I was just afraid it might be invalid.

In another project (guess which), we got so tired of all that strange
restrictions (L)GPL imposed and the reservations some groups (BSD people
especially) had against it, that we entierely switched to MIT style, with
the explicit comment, that you may relicense it to (L)GPL as you like.

CU, Andy

-- 
= Andreas Beck                    |  Email :  <andreas.beck@ggi-project.org> =

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