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rock88 / aLynx-android-port

aLynx - is a Android port of a Handy Win32 - Atari Lynx emulator
MIT License
9 stars 1 forks source link

License clarity... #1

Open pforhan opened 11 years ago

pforhan commented 11 years ago

Can you clarify which verison of SDL you're using? The discussion here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/196953-alynx-atari-lynx-emulator-for-android/ Seems to indicate that it's GPL, but my research says it's either LGPL or zlib.

I flipped through the jni directory, but it's not clear. I see some stuff from snes9x that's personal-use-only and some stuff that looks like GPL from some version of SDL.

I wonder if it'd be worth moving to SDL 2.0...

rock88 commented 11 years ago

I'm not use SDL, but use few function from it in aLynx/jni/src/Utils.c. I'm not quite understood a license, perhaps I should choose something else - LGPL, zlib license or GPL instead of MIT, what do you think? Move to SDL 2.0 not possible, because it's write without SDL, but you can see HandySDL.

pforhan commented 11 years ago

Licenses are a bit confusing, but they're possible to understand with a bit of research.

GPL means that if you use GPL code, your code must also be GPL.

LGPL is a little less severe, sort of depends on how you link to the code. If used as an external library, nothing needs to be done, but if you compile it into the app, your code either needs to be LGPL or you need to allow users a way to replace the library. Generally tricky in any Java app, and android in particular.

zlib and MIT and many other licenses, have fewer restrictions still, often only asking for attribution or even nothing.

As far as what to pick for this project, that's tricky to say. But at least picking one would be a benefit. And you should clean up the random usages of small files that have different or incompatible licenses.