From: Steve Cheng <elmert@ipoline.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 12:21:47 -0400 (EDT)

Re: What about the

Hello.  This is basically a me-too post so that Hartmut would finally stop
bugging us :)

On Mon, 27 Jul 1998, Hartmut Niemann wrote:

> After the wake-up call (which woke up Andy at least :-)
> my opinion:
> 
> It looks to me that nobody of US has any problems with (L)GPL'ing 
> our work. Or is there anybody?

I'm okay with LGPL (for the libGGI part).

> Is there any good in licensing header files? 

Legally, you have to license header files or nobody is allowed to use them.
Just don't use GPL on them :)

> Jason mentioned the PERL artistic license for them. Why? Is that 
> necessary? To me, *.h are basically no code, but an API. Using the
> API is including the .h files. So if the API is published, and the 
> library is LGPL'ed, #including the .h files is using the library.
> Jason, why did you suggest a different license for the headers?

IMHO, Artistic License is way too complicated for header files.  Talk about
"artistic control" and having to mark non-standard changes...

> All libraries fall under LGPL
> All other programs, including the drivers, fall under GPL
> except where noted:
> - some public domain: the VGA driver, demos as decided by their authors.
> - some OS interface parts that have their own license. (i.e. BSD).
> 
> My rationale:
> This software , as it is now, is in some parts OS independent (where
> (L)GPL'ing is possible), in other parts Linux specific, where GPL
> is almost a must. We don't have bsd code yet. 
> Although the (L)GPL has some unclear points, I doubt we could find
> something that is (in terms of legal quality) better, and I doubt that
> we can find something that is acceptable to more of us.

Agree.

> (Somebody pointed out that the license is not too important 
> because if somebody broke it we couln't do anything about it anyway :-(

Not really.  Vendors try not to break a license because it would bring bad
PR.  But nothing's there to stop certain nameless vendor(s) from trying to
implement a competing standard :(

> So please consider that we all want to get back to the fun part, to the
> coding and debbugging and faq-writing :-? and so on.

So what license is the documentation? :-)
(thinking of recent slashdot.org  topic)

> I make the motion to accept this license suggestion, as stated above.
> Who seconds it?

Seconded.

--
Steve Cheng               

email: steve@ggi-project.org   
www: <http://shell.ipoline.com/~elmert/>;