Do you know that the LGPL is a bad license?

[BugHunter]

Hello,

I'm amazed that most projects on sourceforge use LGPL or GPL as their license. Have you ever thought about the implications? In my opinion the BSD license is a much better one.
Read this article to understand my point:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT9068852873.html

If I where you I would try to relicense this library under the BSD license ASAP.

Best regards...

[David Gilbert]

Thanks for your post.

I've read a lot about the different licences for open source software and have a good understanding of the implications of the alternative licences. I'm happy with my choice of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) for JFreeChart and have no plans to change it.

In any case, changing the licence would require the agreement of all the developers who have contributed to JFreeChart since I have not required contributors to assign copyright.

Regards,

Dave Gilbert

[BugHunter]

Well,

I personally would love to contribute new code to JFreeChart, and fix bugs like the above ones. But I probably won't do it as long as it is under the LGPL. The problem is, as a professional programmer I shouldn't read any LGPL code for legal reasons. Read the article above it talks about these contamination issues. At the same time I know that other commercial programmers face the same risk with LGPL code, so I don't want to improve that code...Furthermore xGPL code undermines programmers businesses, so I'm against it...

If it where under a BSD/MIT/X11 style license I would love to contribute. Especially knowing that other programmers and companies could benefit from it also.

I want to say that the company I work for has no interest in producing/selling a Chart program, we are not in the software business.

It is possible to change your license if you find the agreement of the involved programmers or rewrite the parts of those who don't want to agree. AFAIK there are only few contributors to JFreeChart, so I think this is quite possible to achieve...

I know there is another package Chart2D which is also LGPLed. I'm hoping that one of the two will change it's license...

Finally I just want to add that I don't promise to contribute even if the license changes. But the probability of me doing so is certainly much higher with a license that I can agree on...

Best regards,

BugHunter

[David Gilbert]

I did read the article referenced in your first post. I think the author's argument is flawed in several respects, the biggest being that he uses the label xGPL to speak of the GPL and LGPL as though they were the same licence. In fact, they are quite different licences, with quite different implications.

But I don't want to get drawn into a debate about licences...I have too many other things I'd rather do. I can recommend the book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" (ISBN 1-56592-582-3), especially the essays by Brian Behlendorf (Apache) and Bruce Perens (The Open Source Initiative), to anyone interested in a balanced appraisal of the different open source licences.

Aside from that I'd just like to confirm that the licence for JFreeChart is not going to change any time soon...

Regards,

Dave Gilbert