Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 16, 2015 4:11 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by dvdeug
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Yes, it's not that useful in practice. Yet LGPL automatically prohibits distribution for platforms where there's no dynamic linking (iOS, mainly).

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 15:51 UTC (Sun) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (3 responses)

There is no such restriction.

Relinking an application is just more complex if the library is not loaded by the runtime linker.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 19, 2015 0:06 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, there is, in practice. That's why QT still has a costly proprietary license, for example.

Please, educate yourself before posting.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 20, 2015 5:37 UTC (Tue) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (1 responses)

> Please, educate yourself before posting.

Interesting proposal from someone who obviously has not seen the license text of the LGPL.

Spoiler: it does not even contain the string "static".

> That's why QT still has a costly proprietary license, for example.

Some recipients do not like the clauses of the LGPL, e.g. their legal department doesn't want to look into copyleft licenses or they want to incorporate the Qt code into their own directly and not link it.

And there are those who, like yourself, fell for the rumor that statically linking requires the proprietary license.

However, people falling for a rumor, no matter how many, does make the license actually say that.

So, in practise, people think there is a restriction which, in practise and theory, does not exist.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 29, 2015 17:36 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Indeed. Apart from easily-spooked lawyers (how will they survive Halloween?) a significant reason for paying for "commercial" (but not necessarily proprietary) licences is actually for the support benefits you get for your money. Which is why something like PyQt is still actively maintained whereas PySide (which started out as Nokia's feeble attempt to capture the market created by PyQt) is a continuous demonstration of the tragedy of the commons.

And, once again, the "commercial" aspect need not have anything to do with proprietary licensing. There are companies making money selling support for Free Software. Maybe even HP manages to do so.