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Copyleft reference implementationCopyleft reference implementationPosted May 17, 2008 22:06 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)In reply to: Copyleft reference implementation by cannedfish Parent article: The Digital Standards Organization - The Hague Declaration
With LGPL: If you change the implementation (and distribute it) you have to distribute the modified implementation as well.
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Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 18, 2008 10:58 UTC (Sun) by cannedfish (guest, #49561) [Link] Correct. I was commenting on said issue of license incompatibilities with free software though...
Copyleft reference implementation Posted May 19, 2008 6:48 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] It also have the flip side of limiting licensing diversification, which is a bad thing on most counts. The GPL/LGPL, by the sake of being the first (or the first that mattered) and the most popular copyleft license then that means that end users expect compatibility with it. This creates a ad-hoc standard... as long as everything stays compatible with the GPL then that means the GPL is always going to be the 'least free' of the popular free software licenses. I work in a place were I have to go through authorization to include all software in the end product. If a distribution had a dozens of semi-incompatible licenses it would be a nearly impossible task to get the approval to use Linux. Maybe right now it would be 'ok', but the way things are heading it's only getting worse, more expensive, and more difficult. (yeah! government! (that's sarcasm)) The legal overhead would be more expensive then just purchasing some proprietary product from a different vendor. Believe me, the only people that care about having different sorts of licenses are developers. Nobody else cares... well that's not accurate.. everybody else cares (although they'd rather NOT care) and they simply don't want to deal with it. GPL is bad enough, we don't need more of the same. Don't get me wrong. I think the GPL is the key to making free software a competitive system in today's climate (and thus is wonderful).. but having another copyleft license that is not compatible with GPL is only going to hurt except for maybe very specific cases. In other words GPL is a necessary evil and that sort of thing should be kept to a minimum.
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