LGPL (was RE: [Biojava-l] Restriction digest progress)

[Dave Keller]

>
>
>Mat,
>
>I did read the licenses themselves, I believe I understand them, somewhat.
>What I don't understand is the idea that Biojava is distributed under the
>LGPL so that it's not under the LGPL. Is this what the Biojava authors
>actually want to say? It looks like a typo. Is there a third kind of GPL
>license?
>
>
>
I think you misread what was stated:

"BioJava is distributed under LGPL 
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html>. This means that you can use 
the libraries without your software being forced under either the LGPL 
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html> or GPL 
<http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>."

BioJava is distributed under the LGPL.  The software that you or anybody 
else writes does not have to be released under the GPL or LGPL.  This 
means that if write software that uses BioJava, you do not have to 
provide your source code and you can charge a fee for use (not just 
distribution) of the software.

I would imagine that the founders of BioJava opted for the LGPL for the 
reasons stated in this article, 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html:

"Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free 
software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the 
ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage 
over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while 
proprietary developers cannot use it.

Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are 
reasons that can make it better to use the Library GPL in certain cases. 
The most common case is when a free library's features are readily 
available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. 
In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular 
advantage, so it is better to use the Library GPL for that library.

This is why we used the Library GPL for the GNU C library. After all, 
there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have 
driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for 
them, only for us."


I don't know how many prorietary packages that are out there that have 
similar functionality but it seems like the LGPL would be the best way 
to get BioJava accepted by a large amount of people.


Dave