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

[Peter Soetens]

On Monday 15 November 2010 23:38:52 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. 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.
> 

All example code I wrote is in the public domain, being it on the wiki or in 
tar.gz files. Even code I used for training courses. If people want an explicit 
license, I can tag it BSD or whatever the lawyers of the community feel good 
with.

Peter