[PD-dev] flext license

[Frank Barknecht]

Hi,
smoerk schrieb:
> The alternative would be a BSD license, which is the most liberal 
> license. Why not just use the license PD uses? I think it's similar to 
> BSD (or is it BSD license)?
> 
> But also LGPL is much better than GPL... :-)

Well, it's not better, but something different. Before I go on, I'd better
say, that I prefer the GPL for my projects and in general. RMS himself has
written long articles regarding the differece between the LGPL and the GPL,
for example: http://www.fsf.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

In a nutshell it boils down to this: Use the LGPL, if you want proprietary,
non-free software written with your library, use the GPL, if you don't want
this. Plus: If you have written a software/library, that has no commercial
alternative, use the GPL to strengthen the Free software movement.
Because then "we have something, they (the proprietarians) haven't".

> Thomas Grill wrote:
> >It is now released under the GPL what might somehow hamper the
> >development of packages depending on flext. 

The GPL hampers the developement of closed source (flext-)externals. You
have put a whole lot of work into flext and made it open source. I don't
see any gain in releasing it to developers, that wouldn't want to release
their source.

> >The most obvious solution would be the LGPL license, but there may be
> >others i don't know about. Any suggestions?

Although written by the FSF, this document is a great overview of various
open source licenses:
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html

Especially important are the comments on "GPL-Compatible or not" licenses,
because there already are flext-externals written under GPL (mine and most
others, because currently flext is GPL), so they should be able to retain
the GPL in the future as well. 

Actually, I wouldn't bother much reading all those licenses. I don't see
real advantages to using something else than the (L)GPL - with copyleft
enforcing - or the X11 - proprietary usage possible (aka BSD, MIT) -
licenses for open source software. Most other licenses to me just seem like
syntactical sugar. And the Pd license itself looks a little vague in my
eyes. 

ciao
-- 
Frank Barknecht