[fpc-pascal] MPL, LGPL rehashed again

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

I know there has been numerous threads about different licenses. I've
got 1.5 years of archived mails and searched through all of them and
read all related threads on the subject, yet I still have some
questions.

Some product background:
I work for Master Maths, which is in the franchising businuess. I work
at the head office creating their software that is being used by the
franchisees. We do not sell our software to the public or to the
franchisees. We give them (franchisees) the software and unlock it for
a year. After that they simply need to phone user, we verify who they
are and unlock it for another yet. So it continues...

I thought the above is important, because I know with some licenses
there are references to when you sell software, which technically we
do not do. I think we rather fall under the category of in-house
software.

We use the following tools & libraries to create our software:

FPC     (mostly Modified LGPL)
fpGUI   (Modified LGPL like FPC's RTL)
Lazarus IDE (usage simply as an editor)
FBLib   (LGPL 1.2)
tiOPF   (MPL 1.1)

My concern is the last two.  We use Lazarus as our IDE, but we do not
use the LCL and do not use the design time componens (click and drop
components on a form style coding), not sure if this is of relevance.
We do use the Lazarus Packages (*.lpk) to reference the different
libraries we use.

#1
FBLib uses the standard LGPL. We link that software directly into our
executables. We don't use it as an external (dynamically linked)
.so/.dll library.  FBLib is pretty much a wrapper for the Firebird
libfbclient.so library.  If this poses an issue, it should be fairly
easy for us to switch to a different library like sqldb included with
FPC.

#2
I know MPL is not GPL compatible, but we are not creating GPL'ed
software. We are creating software used in-house for our franchisees.
We do not sell our software either. So would this be a concern for us?
 I'm part of the core developers for tiOPF and am pretty sure that if
we need to change tiOPF's license to a Modified LGPL or dual license
it, it should be possible. Again, we link tiOPF directly into our
executable. Does this pose any issues for us?


Regards,
 - Graeme -


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