[ros-users] [Orocos-users] [release] orocos_tools 0.1.0 and orocos_controllers 0.1.0

[Ken Conley]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Herman Bruyninckx
<Herman.Bruyninckx at mech.kuleuven.be> 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. 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.

 - Ken

[1]: http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~orocos/pub/stable/examples/rtt/rtt-examples-1.12.0.tar.gz