Still no new license -- but draft text available

[Grant Griffin]

In article <39997465.A9BC44BD at basho.fc.hp.com>, "John says...
>
...
>The five Python modules I've created and released have all been
>LGPL'ed.  Use of these modules in a commercial environment is perfectly
>fine, with the one caveat that changes TO THE MODULES must be released
>back to the community.

Right.  As you suggest, the _L_GPL is fairly benign.  That's precisely why
Richard Stallman doesn't want you to use it--see his article "Why you shouldn't
use the Library GPL for your next library" at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html.  To that end, he now
euphemistically calls it the "_Lesser_ GNU Public License", rather than
"_Library_ GNU Public License".  (Mr. Stallman evidently has quite a gift for
euphemisms. ;-)

So why doesn't he like it?--heck, he probably even wrote it himself!  Well, it
turns out that its "copyleft" legal virus doesn't infect _other_ software that
the user links with the LGPL'ed library (er, I mean "Lesser"); it only applies
to modules of the original Lesser.  Fortunately, that isn't a severe loss of
freedom to the user, it merely causes users a certain amount of trouble if one
makes changes (so one quickly learns not to.)  But likewise, it really doesn't
accomplish much of The Good Work of infecting software with Copyleft, so Mr.
Stallman would have us abandon it in favor of the "GNU Public License".  (Hey,
waitaminute!  Shouldn't that be the "Greater Public License"?!)
...

>The GPL is not as some have painted it to be.

Perhaps.  But fortunately, the GNU web site and the writings of Richard Stallman
make the intent of the GPL, and (to a lesser extent) the LGPL very, very clear. 
Here's a quote from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html"

"In the GNU project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute
and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might
have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting
GNU software in the public domain, we ``copyleft'' it. Copyleft says that
anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, *must* <emphasis
added> pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees
that every user has freedom."

'must'-is-not-a-convincing-euphemism-for-'freedom'-any-more-than
   'lesser'-is-a-convincing-euphemism-for-'library'-ly y'rs,

=g2

_____________________________________________________________________

Grant R. Griffin                                       g2 at dspguru.com
Publisher of dspGuru                           http://www.dspguru.com
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