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MaddieM4 / pymads

A fork of the pymds authoritative DNS server, designed for asynchronous lookup without domain restrictions.
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
4 stars 2 forks source link

Relicense as LGPL #12

Closed MaddieM4 closed 11 years ago

MaddieM4 commented 11 years ago

I've gotten permission from the author of the original work, to relicense as LGPL. This is a great thing, and I'm hoping to get it done as soon as I finish the work in #4.

danry25 commented 11 years ago

Just curious, what'll relicensing this as LGPL do for pymads & djdns development?

MaddieM4 commented 11 years ago

@danry25 LGPL is my go-to license. It ensures that external development is contributed back to the world under the same license, without putting any uncomfortable burdens on its use. So pymads or DJDNS could be used as components in a closed-source application, for example, but any changes those developers make to the internals of pymads or DJDNS would have to be shared publicly (or at least to their users).

Of course, in a practical, day-to-day sense, this isn't much of a big deal either way. It's mostly insurance. I consider Linux's massive success compared to BSD to be not a technical difference, but a matter of licensing. GPL protections are what made Linux a poster child for corporate contribution, and LGPL provides that in a way that's compatible with the library model.

The GNU Foundation does try to argue for using GPL for licenses instead of LGPL, as a way of waging war against proprietary software, but I don't see that as my war to fight, especially when both sides benefit more by cooperation than by some misguided and tiresome attempts at power plays. I like the LGPL license, and will continue to use it for future projects wherever it makes sense.

danry25 commented 11 years ago

That makes a fair bit of sense, thanks for the explanation.