[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.

Daniël