Re: Kawa (re-)licensing

[Jim White <jim at pagesmiths dot com>]

Per Bothner wrote:
> I'm not sure what the best thing for Kawa is.  Comments?

I firmly believe that LGPL is all that is needed.

People who think that your "unmodified" exception is something they need 
(as Gustavo Muñoz wrote) are simply uninformed because LGPL doesn't 
impose any burden on them (other than making the Kawa sources they use 
available, which since they're unmodified they don't need to do anything 
more than provide a link to the Kawa release they use).

That LGPL is somehow a problem for commercial systems is a 
(unfortunately widespread) myth.  The myth is perpetuated by a lot of 
FUD and laziness.  While there are many examples I could provide as 
proof that LGPL is completely compatible with commercial, paid-for, 
binary-only products, let me cite one that should sufficient:  Mac OS X. 
 It is *very* commercial, binary-only (heck, apparently they even plan 
to use patented Apple-only hardware locking for the Intel version), and 
utterly dependent on, and includes, GCC, the quintessential GPL tool.

Now in the case of GCC it is segregated into GPL and LGPL parts, which 
is not practical for Kawa (and some say for all Java but I believe that 
is more FUD).  LGPL however provides all the flexibilty anybody who 
wants to distribute binary-only needs.

I would like to see you drop your custom license and just use LGPL.  I 
don't know whether it would lead more developers to contribute to Kawa, 
but I agree that the current scheme is something of an impediment.

The MIT-style idea is not good at all.  MIT/X11, Apache, and BSD 
licenses are all essentially the same and they only have one significant 
 difference vs LGPL: they all allow people to make derivative works and 
are *not* required to redistribute the source for the modifications. 
Clearly not what you are after AFAIK.  GNU.org even agrees that Apache 
2.0 is almost compatible with GPL, the sticking point being that they 
handle patents differently.

Jim White