Then if the LGPL holes are dangerous, the X11 license should be even more dangerous; after all it's a much larger hole than the LGPL will ever have. I still don't understand where you are trying to go with your argument.
This has been my argument against Patrick exactly. Some protection is better than none at all.
As a general rule, yes.
However this time the protection comes with a price.
You really make it sound like the LGPL is some kind of unexplored wilderness that we shouldn't venture into. The fact is that a large majority of free software projects use either the GPL or
the LGPL, and
in practice it works just fine for them, just as I'm confident it would work just fine for us.
Agreed. The LGPL is a very well-written fairly clear license. There are some borderline cases as mentioned, but this does not mean that we should thus throw the possibilty of LGPL completely out the window.
The problem is not whether LGPL is well written or not the problem it is the doctrine of derived work. That is very unclear because of lack of good case law.
On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
This has been my argument against Patrick exactly. Some protection is better than none at all.
As a general rule, yes.
However this time the protection comes with a price.
And what might that price be? You fear that we are going to alienate the commercial ventures developed around Wine?
The problem is not whether LGPL is well written or not the problem it is the doctrine of derived work. That is very unclear because of lack of good case law.
Oh, come on, for crying out loud! The LGPL is the best thing we have -- we can't wait for a good case law to adopt a license. Yes, there may be problems, but that's life. We take our best shot -- this is what we're doing with Wine in the first place!
Patrik, your entire arguments are based on such obscure assumptions that's scary! I must tell you, both the GPL and LGPL have received careful scrutiny from FSF's legal council (and a bunch of other law professors, I'm sure). It's the best we can hope for now. You come along with a bunch of 'it is possible' type of scenarios (doh, everything is possible!), and say that 'well, everything's in vain, we're doomed, there's no point in doing anything, actually...'. In all honesty, it just looks stinks. Badly.
-- Dimi.
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Dimitrie O. Paun -
Patrik Stridvall