Re: License survey

[aep <aep@exys.org>]

> Is the LGPL's handling of static linking problematic to you? [...]

The lawyers and suits of a specific fortune 500 i will not name have 
sayd: "GPL<3 has sufficient loopholes that its ok to use it in our 
propriatary products, the rest we solve with patent suits."
GPL is a way to piss of the nice people and ineffective for the evil 
ones. Unless you go for GPL3.

In my opinion LGPL only makes sense if you want to go for dual 
licensing, selling the more liberal one for actual money. That's a tiny 
bit more complicated (reasigning every contribution, yadda yadda), but 
worth it.
Otoh, since i'm probably the only one evaluating musl for comercial 
software, not sure if that fits your target audience. If you're 100% 
sure you want to continue this as a 'hacker project', go 
MIT/BSD/whatever.
The GNU in GNU/Linux is a downhill project anyway. The only prople i 
see who can actually create a large FOSS project with musl are the guys 
around suckless (stali being one example),
and they're more appealed by BSD then GNU.

Personally I prefer commercial dual licensing with LGPL. LGPL itself is 
ok, if you let real lawyers handle it and its exceptions.
It's as ridiciously bloated as every GNU project, often leading to 
misinterpretation on either side. Hidden RMS agenda included. Just... 
ask a real lawyer.

/s/
Arvid


On Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:12:42 -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> Lately there's been a lot of discussion on IRC about license issues,
> starting with Rob Landley's diatribe about acceptance on Android
> systems, and subsequent conversations on similar topics. While musl 
> is
> almost entirely code I've written and I'm not prepared to make any
> immediate changes, I'd like to hear from anyone in the community
> that's built up so far around musl as to what your views on licensing
> are and whether you'd want to see any changes in how musl is 
> licensed.
> Some questions to think about:
>
>
> Which is more important, copyleft or widespread usage of musl?
>
> Which copyleft issue(s) matter most: ensuring the project gets access
> to third-party improvements, protecting users' rights to study and
> reverse engineer, or protecting users' rights to access the code and
> make source-level modifications?
>
> Is it important to have a license where the official distribution is
> not privileged over third-party redistributions? (For example, LGPL
> with an exception that allowed unlimited use of the library in
> unmodified form would privilege me over third parties, since I would
> be the only one who gets to decide what goes in the "unmodified"
> version. Various commercial Open Source licenses have this issue, and
> I believe even glibc's LGPL exception has this issue.)
>
> Is the LGPL's handling of static linking problematic to you?
>
> Are there other devil-in-the-details issues with the LGPL that you 
> see
> as problematic from a practical perspective of deploying musl? 
> (Things
> like technical issues making source available, informing the 
> recipient
> of their rights, etc.)
>
> What would be your ideal license to see musl under?
>
>
> Rich