[xinf] xinf license

[daniel fischer]

hey,

about the licenses: as i stated in the WhatIs, i want xinf, at least the core that is out now, to be usable by anyone in any situation. otoh, yes, i want to protect it a little.

i chose to stick with LGPL now because it is a little less liberal than BSD. from what i heard of the FSF (the free software fundamentalists :), LGPL indeed requires the developer to keep it abstracted away in a library, for the user to be able to exchange the lib with a binary-compatible updated version ("keeping it hackable"). While i dont strongly disagree with that stance, i see it a bit of a problem in the flash world, where really all you want to deliver is a single .SWF. I've mentioned to the FSF guy i was talking to that in theory the classes would be exchangeable even in the binary swf (i think MTASC for example has an option to "overwrite" classes in an existing swf, i think even this is possible with haxe too)- and he statet that it must be *easy* for the user.

now, really, i think this is a little too fundamentalist. the one thing i am really interested in about LGPL is that it requires changes to be re-published. That is, if you modify the library, and distribute it to someone (in any way), you are obliged to open your changes under the same license. Or, regarding xinf: if you make the renderers better, or the existing widgets, you'll have to republish that. Or (preferred) send me a patch.

I really think that the first issue should be pretty much disregarded in the flash world. It makes sense for C/C++ where you can simply drop a different shared lib as a replacement for an existing one. For most SWFs, it's simply impractical.

My interpretation of the license options:
 - GPL requires your complete project to be GPL also. Impractical for many corporations that still adhere to the closed-source mindset. I'm thinking about putting some (future!) modules under GPL to try and make some $ by dual-licensing. (As copyright holder, i can give out the source code under a different license that allows use in a closed-source project. This would get complicated if i was to GPL a module that received contributions.)
 - LGPL only requires your changes to the library itself to be republished. I.e., you can use it for a closed-source project.
 - BSD allows you to do whatever you want, i.e. change it a little and sell it as your own (see Apple :).

I'm with LGPL for now, but if this becomes a serious obstacle for commercial adoption of xinf, i'll likely reconsider. I surely like to hear about any considerations that could make xinf unviable due to its license.

Note also that neko is LGPL (i.e., you can bundle it with your proprietary app) but haXe is GPL (ergo: no bundling unless your app is also GPL), if i interpret all that right. IANAL. 

-dan

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