[PD] Legal restrictions for apps

[i go bananas]

I am the one who originally pushed for expr license change, and contacted
apple, and the original expr licensees, etc....

here's what happened, in summary, from my foggy memory:

i contacted the original author of expr, Mr Yadegari, and explained the
situation that expr was in a strange limbo between vanilla pd and
pd-extended.  It's included in vanilla, but there license is different, etc
etc...

When we looked into it, we found that the original license for expr was in
fact LGPL, not GPL, as stated in the pd documentation.  (So, as Iohannas
suggests, a bug report might be a good idea)

When i asked about the possibility of changing to the pd style BSD license,
Mr Yadegari was totally fine with that, and said that is what he had wished
anyway.
However, the expr license was now under control of the university, and i
would have to contact the relevant people to ask about changing the license
to BSD.

In the meantime, i had called Apple, and asked about the legality of GPL,
and they said GPL was not permitted, as you need to release the code with
the app, and they don't have that facility built in to their app store.
 Then when i asked about the possibility of LGPL, which doesn't need the
source code included in the package, they sent me from person to person,
and i never got a straight answer... basically they told me that if i
wanted to use LGPL, i would have to hire a lawyer to speak with their
lawyer.


So....it seemed like changing the expr license to BSD would be the best
option.
I contacted another developer who Mr Yadegari referred me to, and we spoke
about the possibility of changing the license.   He said no one had touched
expr for years, but couldn't see any reason why not to change it.  He said
he'd need to check with the relevant department at the university, and with
the other developers who had taken on the caretaking of expr.

And then, university summer holidays started, before i could go any
further, and i never heard back again about the license.

So, as far as i understand, the expr developers i spoke to all seemed fine
with the idea of BSD, but we just never got as far as getting everyone
together and making the change.






On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 1:52 AM, IOhannes m zmölnig <zmoelnig at iem.at> wrote:

> On 10/03/13 02:35, Dan Wilcox wrote:
> > - I leave out [expr] & [expr~] for now. The license in the expr src
> folder is LGPL,
> > but the license in the source headers is GPL and the following is
> printed to console
> > when first loading the external: "expr, expr~, fexpr~ version 0.4
> under GNU General Public
>
> there has been extensive discussion on this with the original authors
> (*all* copyrightholders) of [expr] (most of it forwarded/CCed to this
> list), and IIRC correctly the final result as that expr has been
> re-licensed under the LGPL.
> for me this means that the code *is* LGPL, even if on load the
> splashscreen says that it is BSD4 or the microsoft EULA.
>
> but of course it is annoying to have contradictory license information
> staring at your face (esp. when you have to argue with someone like
> apple), so i suggest to fix the headers and the printout.
>
> please file a bug-report (eventually including a patch that does the
> fixing)
>
> fgmasdr
> IOhannes
>
>
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