A specific proposal on licensing

[Chris Travers]

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Josh Berkus <josh at agliodbs.com> wrote:

> All:
>
> I wanted to post this based on a discussion in Bradley's presentation
> yesterday on the project here at SCALE.
>
> I would like the *accounting library* to be licensed LGPL.  My reason is
> that I want to write software which embeds the library which is under a
> different open source license, such as BSD.
>

LGPL sounds about right in this case.

>
> If the library is licensed AGPL, I believe that it will fail in its
> purpose as a library because it will be exclusively reserved to people
> who want to write AGPL applications, which however you cut it is a
> minority of developers.  This is, after all, the reason why the LGPL
> exists; because more restrictive versions of GPL licenses are not
> compatible with library usage.


> This is distinct from the eventual NPO accounting *application*, which
> should probably be AGPL because Blackbaud.
>
> Bradley argued that "we can wait until someone comes to us and wants to
> build something to relicense".  I believe that's a huge mistake; the
> majority of potential downstream application builders will dismiss the
> project without ever contacting us if the license is wrong.
>

On top of that, if the API is specified, the more likely result is that
people will say "hey this is cool.  Let's re-implement for interoperability
purposes."

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

>
> --
> Josh Berkus
> PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
> http://pgexperts.com
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>



-- 
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

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