Am 25.10.2011 um 19:10 schrieb Hans-Christoph Steiner:
On Oct 25, 2011, at 10:15 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Le 2011-10-25 à 12:19:00, Max a écrit :
So what is the situation now that expr could be LGPL instead of GPL? What does that mean for things like the Apple App Store?
In the end I'm not sure anymore that LGPL would be fine, even though it does look like Apple ships with LGPL libs. (Though it's not impossible they might have rewritten them just to avoid the license...).
There's too much contradiction between comments about it on the web, so, to sort out the subtleties, it would be best to ask the FSF about it.
Well, you could ask Apple too. But I bet that the FSF will give more attention to your question.
The problems are with software that ships from the Apple App Store, due to the way that is managed and the Terms of Service. It is the management and terms of service of the App Store that conflict with the GPL/LGPL. Apple ships lots of GPL and LGPL software as part of Mac OS X and iOS, but that does not touch the Apple App Store, so they can be in complete compliance.
So Max, if you are interested in the Apple App Store, I think it is incompatible with all FSF licenses, and perhaps all copyleft licenses. The short term answer is to ship your iOS apps outside of the App Store, and the real fix is to get Apple to make their App Store compatible with copyleft licenses.
The question was asked by the author of expr - maybe I must re-phrase: Now that IRCAM is okay with changing their license of parts of expr from GPL to LGPL would that solve the issue of expr beeing used in the BSD vanilla in applications like for instance RJDJ in the Apple App store? (Or respectively any other use scenario where the choice of license imposes restrictions) If the answer is yes, then Shahrokh can go ahead and change the licence, fixed. If the answer is no, then a rewrite of expr to be fully BSD is probably the only solution to solve this.
m.