Art of Solving

This is a piece of non-news really. But in this period of controversies upon open source licenses (Ext JS, S2AP, etc.) you may be relieved to know that I have no intention whatsoever of switching to a more restrictive license for JODConverter and JODReports. And I am mentioning this because I did in fact recently receive a proposal that involved releasing JODConverter under a dual GPL/commercial licensing scheme in order to make some money out of it.

JODConverter is LGPL, has been LGPL for a few years now, and will stay LGPL. It's a library, so it's just not very useful unless other developers are free to distribute the jar as part their own project (commercial or not) without requiring the whole application to fall into the same license, like the GPL does. Plus JODConverter depends on OpenOffice.org, and OpenOffice.org itself is LGPL.

Now for the actual subject of this post. All these recent discussions about licenses made me think that I should clarify one point about my own licensing policy. A new version of the LGPL, i.e. v3, has been published by the FSF almost one year ago. OpenOffice.org is also adopting the LGPL v3. starting from the first OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta.

My projects currently ship with the LGPL v2.1, but the LGPL 2.1 contains a clause saying that you can opt for a newer version of the same license if you want. So just to be clear: you can already choose the LGPL v3 for the current versions of JODConverter and JODReports if you wish. There is no need for me to release a new package with an updated version of the license.

In fact I would say that opting for the LGPL v3 is a good idea, since it apparently is a clearer license. For example v2.1 contains the following restrictive clause

you may also combine or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications