[barcode] change to LGPL possible ?

[Alessandro Rubini]

Hello.

Please forgive my delay: I found the answer by Dominik Seichter to
be good enough to lower the priority of a direct reply from me.
And these are busy times, indeed.

> As i read in an other Posting you are not unwilling to change GNU
> Barcode to LGPL.

Yes. While I share the basic idea behind "Why you shouldn't use the
Library GPL for your next library", I think it might be somewhat too
stretched and I don't consider it the best choice for GNU barcode,
after all.

Some time ago, when another programmer had to incorporate it in a
proprietary application, we discussed the issue and I managed to find
out all copyright holders, I even had a short email conversation with
Bradley Kuhn of FSF back then about it.

Among the authors, we managed to agree about the issue and finally
decided to have the package on ransom. This would mean that I would
collect signed agreements from all copyright holders (several of them
exists, both persons and a company, but not too many not to get at all
of them). I then would issue an invoice for the amount agreed upon,
and make donations to the other after removing 40% or so for my taxes.

This is not completely clean as far as the fiscal side is concerned,
but the risk is manageable (I've already enough problems with the
fiscal authorities for the amount of unregistered hardware I'm keeping
in my office -- and for saying that in public archives).

> I know the Problem is to get the accept of the other
> coders (copyrightholders) but other Projects do it
> like this:
> Announce the change of the License for next Release
> on the Homepage and give the People the chance to
> give their veto in the Time of maybe 4 weeks.

This is very bad practice, indeed. Copyright is a minefield, and we
shouldn't take it easy.  I contributed to several projects, and I
don't monitor each and every web site at all; most authors behave in
the same way.  While my own contributions don't make me a copyright
holder on those packages, if I were I wouldn't accept the license to
be changed without my consent.  And while I personally wouldn't make a
mess out of a LGPL-to-GPL changes, I would legally be allowed to.
I don't want to violate the copyright of people who contributed
to GNU barcode, by changing the license they chose to contribute
under.

For the packages that did so, I hope they won't have any legal
problem, as they could easily be made undistributable in the future,
if different authors contributed under incompatible licenses -- this
is not the case of GPL and LGPL, but the "veto" technique you suggest
could be applied to more dangerous license pairs.

As for the ransom, it might sound bad (or too high), but this
procedure involves a lot of paperwork, and I'd really better write
code than contracts. If you (or your company) agree to this, I'll have
to start it over again, contacting all authors and getting the
contracts in place _before_ I can confirm it can be done and getting
the payment from you.

Actually, if I were a company, I could happily set up a system to get
payments in this way, with a secretary handing the legal stuff and
collecting copyright assignment from contributors in exchange of a
share of the future income. Unfortunately this would mean quite some
problems with the fiscal system, so it isn't viable either.  But I'm
not a company, so I avoid paperwork as much as possible, even though I
don't ignore the need to get paid for my work and pay my rents.

Please let me restate that nowadays I would probably have started with
the LGPL since the beginning.

Also, please note that even a LGPL packages in your proprietary
application would mean distributing the source of that component with
the application, as well as the scripts to relink the application (nor
needed if the LGPL component is a shared library, as replacing the
file would be the same as relinking).  This is usually a big deal for
distributors of proprietary software, and that's why I think the
original reply by Dominik Seichter was good enough.

Thanks for appreciating our work,
/alessandro