[fpc-devel] LGPL vs BSD

[Jonas Maebe]

On 4 aug 2006, at 14:38, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>>> For the libraries, the situation is pretty much the same (modified
>>> LGPL and BSD don't differ THAT much in practice.
>>
>> Apart from the fact that improvements to LGPL libraries have to be
>> distributed also in source form, while that's not the case for the
>> BSD license.
>
> I didn't say LGPL, I said modified LGPL, by which I meant ours. And  
> that says
>
> "If you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your  
> version of
> the library, but you are not obligated to do so".
>
> So with modified LGPL I can get out of source publishing too, at  
> least that
> is how I intepret the license text.

They can only get out of source publishing (or dynamic linking, or  
publishing object files of the rest of your application) for their  
own application. Not for the RTL itself (while a BSD-licensed RTL  
would not require anyone to publish changes done to the RTL).

What you quote above merely means that if you change the library, you  
are allowed to up/downgrade (depending on your opinion) the license  
back to pure LGPL.

>> Or do you mean that in practice, most users of BSD
>> libraries also publish the changes?
>
> I think, the ones that would with LGPL generally will anyway.

They are obliged to do so if the library is covered by the LGPL (as  
modified by us or not).


Jonas