[Insight-developers] Linear algebra licensing and ITK 3.18 Release

[Luis Ibanez]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 9:48 PM, Emmanuel Christophe
<emmanuel.christophe at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Luis,
>
> I was not questioning the legality of the LGPL (that would be another
> debate to be examined country by country...), but illustrating the
> fact that contrary to popular belief, static linking to LGPL doesn't
> make you work LGPL.
>
> You have to provide the user with a way to modify the LGPL portion of
> the program and rebuild the program. The licence on the rest of the
> code can be whatever you want. This is based on the LGPL v3, the
> earlier version is not so explicit about that.
>
> Also, I don't understand the incompatibility with the BSD license. I
> could see why there would be a problem with the MIT one due to the
> "granted [...] to deal in the Software without restriction".
>
> As you said, you could carry a LGPL library in Utilities, but the only
> precaution you would have to take is display a clear information about
> the license if ITK is built using the LGPL library. If it is built
> without the LGPL part, it would automatically retain the BSD license.
> Of course, this is only from a technical standpoint, I'm not sure it
> would be very practical and given the choice, it would be more
> convenient to include only BSD licensed code.
>
> I'm having difficulty to find a use case where that could be a
> problem, but I might be missing something here, so please let me know
> what book to read ;-)
>
> Emmanuel
>
>
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Hi Emmanuel,


I highly recommend the following two books:


 "Open Source Licensing:
 Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law"
 by Lawrence Rosen
 http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm


 "Intellectual Property and Open Source
  A Practical Guide to Protecting Code"
  by Van Lindberg
 http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960

---


Regarding the burden that a warning-based system
will impose in ITK, please consider that ITK carries
14 different packages in the Utilities directory.

If we start deviating from packages whose license
is equivalent (read "compatible") with a BSD license,
then your experience of downloading ITK will change
to require you to read the (potential) 14 different licenses
of each one of these components.

The consequence will be what happens with most EULAs:
"nobody will read them", most people will ignore them, and
there will be frequent violations of the multiple licenses.

Not a good situation...


     Regards,


          Luis


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