[Gpe-list] LGPL for libs - guideline for the past and today

[Nils Faerber]

Hi all!
Recently Neal came up with a good question regarding licensing for GPE
libraries within GPE. Promptly afterwards some of us told him that LGPL
was preferred in GPE for libraries and that this has been already ever
since the project started.

Well, actually this was also my thinking and I am pretty sure about it,
since I came up with this idea initially ;)

But actually it is quite hard to find proof for it, admittedly.
There are two reasons for it. One is that we, i.e. the GPE project,
never had a very formal statement of this. It was clear for the initial
developers so noone really cared about formalising it. This notion was
obviously lost within the years.
Also searching the mailinglist archives is hard, because the older
archives are no longer available on hh.org.

But what is available, thanks to George France keeping up the ancient
GPE homepage, is the old GPE homepage version which pretty clearly sais
the following on the very first starting page:

"GPE is committed to the Open Source idea. All GPE core components are
released under GNU licenses, applications using the GPL and shared
libraries using the LGPL. Those allow for the most free usability of the
GPE system."
(Unchanged quote from "http://gpe.handelds.org" which still serves the
old and unmainted first version of the GPE homepage, dated from
2006-11-08) I can still remember having written that paragraph, so blame
me if you need to blame someone ;)

This should make any further discussion pretty pointless whether this
was initially intended or not.
Yes, it was. Fullstop.

This of course does not mean that this is the final whisdom and is put
in stone for eternity. But it is at least the rule for the beginning of
GPE until now. For for all libs that may be used by third party apps
LGPL is the license that is preferred. This does not affect libraries
which are only used within one or a very limited set of apps which
belong to GPE. The intention of LGPL for libraries like libeventdb is
that also closed source applicaitons using the same framework should be
possible. Noone wants to encourage this but I would to at least enable
it. Think of an application like a navigation application (like Nokia
770 Navi Kit) that would be able to use GPE application framework and
access the contacts database for retrieving addresses. Wouldn't that be
cool? And do you think that Navicore would like to GPL their application
just to support GPE?
We should be realistic here. Yes, in an ideal world all software should
be free. But we do not live in an ideal world. We all still have to earn
a living and this does also mean that some software will be closed
source and even worse commercial (to pay for). But if free alternatives
exist they will be used instead, I am sure. Or think about very spcific
softwares that will probably never be written by the open source
community, that cost a lot to develop and are only used by a very
limited number of clients? We would lock out this kind of development
from being done with GPE. Those people would then go and buy the Q-thing
instead ;)

So for the time being I would like to see those kinds of apps also
support by GPE natively and to make use of the framework we built.

Comments?

Cheers
  nils faerber

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