Open Source Licence (LGPL or GPL)

[Dave Cragg]

At 10:22 am +0100 11/9/03, David Bovill wrote:

>>  (By the way, I'll continue to make any updates for libUrl
>>available for the MC IDE. I guess these will continue to be posted
>>on the RunRev site, but when a site is finally settled for the MC
>>IDE, I suppose that would be a more appropriate location.)
>>
>
>It would seem clear to me that if the MC IDE is open source and the
>MC IDE contains as is libURL then libURL is open source - we just
>need to decide on a license. Dave if you are making user
>contributions to libURl and not signing over copyright to RunRev for
>each change then this can cause a problem for RunRev over who owns
>the copyright of the aggregate work. A clear open source licence
>protects RunRev and us from these type of issues.

Any copyright attaching to my contributions belongs to RunRev. 
However, my work built on already existing material, and I don't know 
the exact status of that earlier library. (Although my understanding 
is that it was public domain.)  I don't really anticipate any problem 
here as long as libUrl is considered public domain (or even if it is 
subject to runRev's own license, as we're all going to be Rev 
licensees assuming we renew.). But it would be nicer to get this 
cleared up. I'll contact Kevin & Co. on this matter.

However, there is a more general issue with GPL or similar licenses 
relating to parts of the MC IDE that  we might include in our 
developed apps. In addition to libUrl, there are all the other things 
listed in the Resource Mover stack (message box, cursors, etc.). I 
don't think anyone would want to see their finished apps having to 
become open source just because they included the print dialog that 
comes with the IDE.

Cheers
Dave