[LAU] licensing fun, was Re: Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano

[drew Roberts]

On Thursday 18 September 2008 10:29:38 James Stone wrote:
> > The licenses for Eisenkraut and FScape (both under the GPL) are
> > restricted in similar fashion to LinuxSampler :
> >
> > "please note that you are /not allowed/ to use this software if you are
> > a member of a military or pharmaceutical or governmental institution
> > (excluding public service in general and civil science/education). if
> > you have sympathies for bad governments (applies to most countries), you
> > should also opt to /not use/ this software. thank you."
>
> I think this statement is not part of the license (the page says the
> program is licensed under GPL). IIRC, zynaddsubfx used to have a
> similarly non-free statement about not using the program to write
> music "against God" (such as heavy metal).. (I'm not sure Christian
> heavy metal bands would agree with this but... whatever!). I think it
> was discussed briefly on this forum and people concluded that this was
> merely the authors wish, and was not part of the legally binding
> license.. now whether that is legally OK I don't know. LS takes a
> different approach and tries to integrate their wish more closely into
> the license documentation, saying GPL applies apart from for
> commercial implementations - in commercial software and hardware.. So
> although it is shades of grey, this is seen as non-free whereas the
> others are seen as free (although the others are vastly more
> unreasonable in my opinion)..
>
> What I don't quite understand is that Qt has a free/commercial
> separate licensing, but no-one has the same kind of problem with qt
> that they have with LS? Would someone care to explain?

Sure. Not that I don't have problems with the QT approach, but those problems 
relate to risk of license changes in the future.

With QT, you can be as commercial as you like so long as your commercial 
efforts fall within the scope of the GPL. (For the Qt Open Source Edition. If 
this is the same code base, then this is not a big problem, if it is 
a "lesser" code base in any way, I have bigger problems with what they are 
doing.)

With the LS license, even if you can be commercial within the bounds of the 
GPL, they say no. That is the difference in a nutshell.

One says you can have this code and obey the GPL or pay us and not obey the 
GPL.

The other says You can't have this code under the GPL fully, you can pretend 
it is under the GPL except for certain commercial uses.

One set of code is actually under the GPL, the other is not.

This is my best effort at understanding things quickly right now.
>
> James

all the best,

drew