Re: Licensing issues with a research project

[Tassilo Horn]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

Hi David,

> Ignore the "Alexander Terekhov" nonsense.

Who's that? ;-)

> As long as you get every single copyright holder to agree, you can
> make use of whatever gentlemen agreement you want (but it might
> restrict people who are not in the deal).  If not, you need to heed
> the conditions of every single license on every piece of code.  Where
> you exceed the threshold of mere aggregation of independent
> components, the licenses might place restrictions on distribution of
> the resulting whole.

Well, it seems there's more than plain aggregation.  For example there
are classes in the EPL-licensed core that extend classes of our GPLed
library.

This is a scenario we didn't encounter till now.  Our library is
dual-licensed as GPL, but you can also get a commercial license for use
in commercial products.  We never considered the current scenario that
the library is used by free software that is not GPL-compatible.

Would switching to LGPL solve the issue?  I guess no, because it is no
plain linking, but an extension.

To be fully correct: Our lib is GPL and it has a code generator which
spits out java code.  The generated code is also GPLed currently, and
the EPL code specializes the generated classes only.  Could we change
our lib to LGPL and spit out BSD-style licensed code, so that the
library itself is only used/linked and only the generated code is
extended/modified?

Bye,
Tassilo