Frank Barknecht schrieb:
Hi, smoerk schrieb:
The alternative would be a BSD license, which is the most liberal license. Why not just use the license PD uses? I think it's similar to BSD (or is it BSD license)?
But also LGPL is much better than GPL... :-)
Well, it's not better, but something different. Before I go on, I'd better say, that I prefer the GPL for my projects and in general. RMS himself has written long articles regarding the differece between the LGPL and the GPL, for example: http://www.fsf.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
In a nutshell it boils down to this: Use the LGPL, if you want proprietary, non-free software written with your library, use the GPL, if you don't want this. Plus: If you have written a software/library, that has no commercial alternative, use the GPL to strengthen the Free software movement. Because then "we have something, they (the proprietarians) haven't".
The problem with the GPL for libraries is, that you don't have the freedom to use another license than GPL for your externals for example a BSD license. If I were a developer and wanted to write a external for pd, I would not use the GPL flext library, because it forces me to put my code under the GPL license. So I would write my external only for pd instead of using flext and make it portable.