[Gpe-list] Use of LGPL

[Graham Cobb]

On Tuesday 27 February 2007 18:01, Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> I have intentions of doing further work on GPE.  I'd like to know what
> the community's view on this issue is.  Is this policy the one the
> community prefers?  Does the community feel that all libraries must be
> licensed under the LGPL and would prefer to refuse the integration of
> enhancements if they were under the GPL?

Neal,

Let me start by saying how much I value your contributions and thanking you 
for your efforts.  I would certainly not want to put you in a position where 
you are not willing (and happy) to continue contributing.

On the other hand, I support Florian's view that for a project like GPE it is 
best to have the libraries under LGPL.  I would like to encourage more use of 
the GPE tools, in the hope that it will result in more contributors and even 
better applications.  As part of that, allowing commercial applications to 
integrate with our databases (in a maintainable and supportable manner) 
should be encouraged.  

If, for example, someone created a commercial sales contact tracking tool for 
one of our supported platforms I would much prefer that they integrated it 
with gpe-contacts and gpe-calendar (and opensync and all the other things 
that implies) than that they said "sorry, but calendar integration is not an 
important enough feature to us that we are willing to open our source to be 
able to include it" or "we created a separate contact database because we did 
not want to open the source to the commercially valuable part of our code".  
Of course we want to encourage such a developer to open their application but 
if they decide not to open it I believe we (as a community) would lose out if 
that meant they had to create their own databases.

There could be a discussion, of course, as to whether some library features 
are sufficiently valuable that commercial developers should have to open 
their application as the price for getting access to them.  Maybe vtype 
import/export should be in that category.  But there is advantage in a simple 
to understand rule. And also, for features like that, it is easy to imagine 
someone creating a small GPL application (similar to gpesyncd) and piping 
data to/from it for doing the conversions, so making it GPL doesn't stop 
people using it either.

Bottom line: I would like to encourage developers to open up their code but I 
also see benefit to the community in being able to work with developers who 
are not willing to open up their code.  So, I would like to continue with the 
current policy.

Graham