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

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Mon, 15 Nov 2010, Ken Conley wrote:

> 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.

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