[PPL-devel] LGPL?

[Roberto Bagnara]

Oscar Slotosch wrote:
> Dear PPL Developers,
> 
> as you know Ernst Sassen is buidling a Java interface (and an Abstract Model
> Interpretation) for the free AutoFOCUS tool. 

Dear Oscar and Ernst,

what do you mean, exactly, by "free"?  For instance, judging from
http://autofocus.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/autofocus-bin/download,
it seems that AutoFOCUS cannot be downloaded without registering.
Moreover, from the download page it is not clear in which format
(source or binary) and license the tool is made available.

> Since the experiments looks very promissing, we currently consider to make a
> product for commercial tools out of it.
> 
> However your licence GPL prevents using your library for hat purpose.
> 
> If you would use the less restrictve LGPL (from
> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt) 
> as licence, we could use your PLL fort hat purpose.
> 
>  
> 
> How do you think about that?

We are happy that experiments with the PPL look very promising,
to the point of making you think about commercial products.
However, the PPL is not released under the GNU General Public
License by chance.  I will spare you all the philosophy behind
such a choice and go straight to the issue you are probably more
interested in.  Suppose we release the PPL to you under the LGPL:
how would you contribute back to our project then?
There are basically two ways you can have the PPL: under the GPL,
in which case you will contribute back with your source code
if you decide to release;  or under an alternative licensing scheme,
in which you will contribute back by funding our research
(post-doc positions, PhD studentships, equipment, travel money...).

> Salutti di Monaco,
> 
>             Oscar & Ernst

Saluti da Parma!
All the best,

     Roberto

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it