[logback-dev] License (again)

[Ceki Gulcu]

Ralph,

First, thank you for sharing your perspective with us. I appreciate
the new perspective on this topic.

Ralph Goers wrote:
> Ceki,
> 
> There are an infinite number of cases where no one outside of a 
> particular company, or even a business unit of a company, would have any 
> interest in some of these Appenders. Customers might not even want them 
> when the product is sold externally. But to avoid having to go through 
> the hassle of what you describe below, but still be in compliance with 
> the license, all the LGPL'd code would need to by physically kept 
> separate from all the other code to avoid it being distributed. This is 
> just painful to manage.

You mean that if the work derived from the LPGLed library were
distributed, then you would need to comply with provision 4 of LGPL
2.1 which mandates that the derived work must be available in source
code? Is there any other provision causing you trouble?

Instead of separating the LGPLed code, why don't you just add the
source code of the LGPLed code in addition to the object form within
your existing distribution? If you already want to include or have
included the object form, adding the source code form should not be
difficult. No?

> Setting up servers or creating code bases to manage tiny bits of code is 
> almost nonsensical in its practically. The cost of the hardware, 
> software and people time to manage just isn't worth the effort and is 
> even less appealing than separating the code.

When I said that the source code had to be available and listed the
options available, I did not imply that the said code had to be
supported. I think that you can just dump it on your blog, some
web-page, or send it as a zip file on a publicly available mailing
list. However, you also have the option of adding the source code to your
existing distribution, which is probably the easiest approach.

> This isn't about proprietary code. I simply guarantee you that you would 
> not be interested in accepting the Appenders in these cases, as they 
> have no value to the general public.  For example, in some cases 
> database appenders might be written to log to some pre-existing database 
> schema. Why would the community want that? In my case, we have an 
> Appender that I wrote and hate, but can't kill because it interacts with 
> our legacy system. I would never distribute it, but for simplicity it is 
> packaged with other general purpose stuff, none of which has the LGPL 
> distribution restrictions. To manage this I will have to create a new 
> isolated project with this single class just to avoid this issue.

You don't need to create an isolated project. Just aggregate the one
or two classes involved in a zip file and dump it someplace. Note that
you only need to take action if the said classes are distributed with
you product. If the said classes are used within your company without
outside distribution, you don't have to take any particular action.



-- 
Ceki Gülcü
Logback: The reliable, generic, fast and flexible logging framework for Java.
http://logback.qos.ch