[cairo] Re: License for cairo changed to LGPL

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

[ 
  I wont be able to read any replies until two weeks from now
  as am going on vacation -miguel
]

> > this prevents our users on embedded systems 
> > from creating a applications that do not 
> > offer the LGPL requirements
> 
> I thought the mono libraries are under LGPL, too.

They are dual licensed and they are offered without the linking
restriction to folks that need so.

Those who needed that paid for the work to get Mono on PPC (Linux and
MacOS) and also paid for the precompilation of binaries (Ahead of Time
compilation) and a few hooks to do real time systems.

We can do that as we own the whole copyright of Mono, but am afraid that
Cairo going GPL without copyright assignment and a path to have
proprietary extensions will not permit that use.

> Well, even if certain .NET libraries are released
> under the MIT license -- probably in order to avoid
> compatibility problems with MS "shared source license"

The reason for using the MIT X11 license has nothing to do with "Shared
Source".   It has to do with the reading of the license for "derivative
works" and class libraries.

Collaborators and customers felt the wording on the LGPL was too vague
and could easily turn into a liability (every contributor can
"interpret" and voice his opinion on the license, so we could put whole
systems in jeopardy;   You can read the thread on the Mono mailing
lists).

> --, I think your customers cannot use the whole system
> anyway.  What do you or your company gain by allowing
> someone to freely use, modify and sell those parts of
> your original work on CE .NET?

Today this is a very common use of Mono and we have no problem with it:
it grows the community of Mono users, and we help people write more
applications, so we think this is a good thing. 

Lots of people cut and paste code from Mono to run on the .NET Compact
Framework as the Compact Framework has a subset that is not suited for
every user.

So Mono's source code has become a repository for people to fix holes
and missing features for their apps.  

We do get various fixes and improvements from our users, I guess part of
it is that they do not want to maintain a forked version forever, they
have so far worked with us to integrate their fixes and improvements
directly into the code base.

In my experience, the MIT X11 license so far has been positive.  

> Regarding dynamic linking: I may be wrong, but I'd say
> that if the resources of the embedded system are so
> limited that it does not even support shared
> libraries, then your customer will have a big problem
> running a complete VM on this system anyway.

Well, you are not wrong, but there are many other systems much 

Well, Mono runs just fine on those systems.  Systems that do not even
have the notion of process, where Mono is "burned" into the OS ROM for
instance.

Miguel