[DAS] Question about das development.

[Lincoln Stein]

Another unexpected thing about GPL, as explained to me by no other than 
Richard Stallman, is that it extends to the documentation of the software, so 
that you cannot publish the manual to the software without making the 
manuscript available for download and redistribution.  The MySQL group was 
bit by this when they tried to publish an expanded manual via O'Reilly.

Lincoln

On Wednesday 21 August 2002 11:44 am, Matthew Pocock wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>
> We use LGPL for BioJava for the reasons you state. We are more than
> happy for other people to use biojava in both nonprofit and commercial
> applications. We are not keen to have someone extend it and then claim
> ownership of the original code base. LGPL covers us for this (I hope).
> GPL would not be appropreate for us as it would force everyone who
> distributed code that links to BioJava to also be GPL-compliant, killing
> of the possibility of MS using BioJava as their standard bioinformatics
> .NET library ;-) I don't want to get into a licensing war - in fact, I'd
> be happy for biojava to be under a BSD-like, or perl artistic-like
> license. The spirit and reason for LGPL just happens to coincide with
> what we want out of a license for library code.
>
> Matthew
>
> Bill Gooding wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Thanks, Lincoln.  That's exactly what I needed to know.  And even if my
> > jar files become a problem in the das repository, you can always destroy
> > the history on them.
> >
> > As to these open source licences, to tell you the truth, I don't really
> > have a detailed understanding of any of them.  I am not sure any lawyer
> > has a detailed understanding either :-).  I am intending to allow free
> > access to the code, so all I really want to is protect myself from
> > trouble.  What I do understand about LGPL, is that anyone can take the
> > source code and use it,extend it,sell it, even relicense it however they
> > like (including me).  If they do any of these things, they have to
> > ackowledge that they got the code from my package (that is LGPL) and
> > give a link to where others can get the code.  If this is true (and I
> > think it is, please correct me if not), then this should be fine.  The
> > only problem might be if they decide to randomly patent some extension
> > (which I don't think they could do, given that it would be an extension).
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Bill
>
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-- 
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Lincoln D. Stein                           Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
lstein@cshl.org			                  Cold Spring Harbor, NY
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