[fpc-devel] LGPL vs BSD

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Fri, 4 Aug 2006, schreef Graeme Geldenhuys:

> The BSD license is starting to sound like a much easier license than
> the LGPL, as long as you are not interested in changes made to the
> library by others.
> =

> I guess it is fair if you think of it as follows.  If a company
> invests a $1mil per year to improve a library for commercial use
> (think along the lines of Qt here), if it was LGPL'ed, they had to
> give all that work away which doesn't make financial sense.

QT is GPL. If want to develop non-GPL software with it, you need to pay a =

lot of money.

> But if it
> was BSD based, they could decide what they wanted to release back to
> the community in good faith (think Mac OS X here).

Yes, but if a company that invests 1 mil EUR in software, uses FPC, and =

needs to improve something in the RTL, the LGPL guarantees those changes =

will be contibuted back.

This happens in practise as well, the Wine project switched from BSD to =

GPL, after which the amount of contributed code greatly increased.

It is unlikely someone would invest 1 mil in the RTL, even if it were =

BSD.

Dani=EBl