[fpc-devel] LGPL vs BSD

[Joost van der Sluis]

On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 11:09 +0200, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 8/4/06, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be> wrote:
> > a modified LGPL license, which says that this is not necessary. The
> > modification means that you only have to make available the
> > modifications you did to the RTL/LCL source, and not make available
> > all object files of your application for relinking.
> >
> > Of course, if you also statically link against another LGPL'd
> > library, this exception is moot.
> 
> 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. 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).

If fpc/lazarus was under BSD license, I woudn't help developing it.

This difference is exactly what the gpl makes the gpl. If I have
developed some code, and give it away for free and some company makes
some improvements and start earning money with it. At the same time they
could refuse to give me their improvements, so that I'm stuck. They
didn't help me to improve my code.. but they can go with my work and
make their profit...

That's the difference between BSD and the (L)GPL.

Joost