Advogato: A tale of two licences

“This is the tale of how two software projects with
different free licences learned to live happily together. It covers
the different commercial reasons why Jtrix chose the LGPL and Mckoi
chose the GPL, the pluses and minuses of each, and how they can
interoperate without compromising principles or commercials.

… The technical developmental details are outside the scope of
this article and our discussions. But Toby and I easily reached a
good understanding on the licencing issues. The most important
point, which doesn’t usually come up in (L)GPL discussions is that
the platform is completely independent of what code runs on it. For
example, it’s fine to run GPL code on the proprietary Windows
platform, just as it’s possible to run a the proprietary Oracle on
the GPL GNU/Linux platform. In our case, it’s okay to run a GPL
application on the LGPL Jtrix platform. The platform does not rely
on the application to work and is distributed separately.
Personally, this gave me a whole new respect for the GPL and
further demonstrated its author’s intentions.”

Complete
Story