On Mon, 15 Nov 2010, Ken Conley wrote: > On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Herman Bruyninckx > wrote: >> There is absolutely no difference between LGPL and GPL in the context in >> which I have made my remark: the concept of "derivative code" is exactly >> the same for both :-) (Both licenses just differ in what they allow you to >> do with derived work.) >> >> Anyway, I am not making any legal stance at all, except that I am trying to >> make people _aware_ of the existence of such grey zones. There is no final >> answer to that 'grey zone' issue, because all legislative systems (as far >> as I am aware) will leave it to a judge to decide about such cases. Since I >> am very anxious to keep Orocos (and also ROS) industry-ready, we (Orocos, >> ROS) should try to avoid any grey zones, whenever possible, even if it is a >> grey zone between two free software licenses: I would not be surprised _at >> all_ to see a malafide lawyer attack ROS and Orocos for mutual license >> violations if that would be a appropriate strategy for a ROS/Orocos >> enemy... >> >> My suggestion would be to dual license this kind of "ROS-Orocos" bridge >> code, with LGPL and BSD the obvious license choices. > > I downloaded the "rtt examples" from the Orocos web site [1]. Within > that tarball, I can find no license, except for a GNU FDL license > relating to an XML document. Thanks for this information! I am not at all happy with that situation, and I have urged the coders to take appropriate action. > As example/tutorial code is documentation > of intended use, it seems counter to the LGPL to transfer an LGPL > license to it. If that is the intent, then the example code should > contain explicit licenses within the source code. Personally, I think > it would be a shame to expect developers to avoid tutorials just > because they are working on non-GPL/LGPL code. Tutorials are complementary to code, and, indeed, it makes sense to add other kind of licensing to them. > - Ken > > [1]: http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~orocos/pub/stable/examples/rtt/rtt-examples-1.12.0.tar.gz Herman