Thread: [RFC] On the roles of Maemo Council and Maemo e.V.
View Single Post
wicket's Avatar
wicket is offline wicket
2014-09-25 , 06:54
Posts: 634 | Thanked: 3,266 times | Joined on May 2010 @ Colombia
#27
Originally Posted by juiceme View Post
As intresting as this discussion about Midgard ownership is, I do not think it is relevant to this thread.
Agreed. I really didn't want to get involved in this but in an attempt to set the record straight and hopefully end this bickering, I'll bite. :/ (Mods: please feel free to move this along with all other irrelevant posts)

Originally Posted by woody14619 View Post
Midgard is "Free Software" according to their wiki & web page, and is actually covered under LGPL. This means that companies can used it in commercial products, and are not required to divulge their additions. You may notice the line, right on the wiki page linked above, stating directly:

Applications developed using the Midgard application programming interfaces (API) can be copyrighted and licensed under any terms by their authors, enabling creation of commercial products and services based on the platform.

So, in short: YOU ARE LEGALLY WRONG ON THIS MATTER.
It looks like you've misinterpreted the LGPL. LGPL is very similar to the GPL with the main difference being that LGPL software can be compiled and then dynamically linked with software of another licence (which can be closed/proprietary) and then be redistributed together as a bundle. Companies can indeed use it in commercial products, they don't need to change the licence of their commercial product however the LGPL part remains licensed under LGPL. Contrary to your claim, this means that they must divulge additions to the LGPL'd software.

See here for a summary of the licence and note the "Disclose Source" part under the "Must" section.
__________________
DebiaN900 - Native Debian on the N900. Deprecated in favour of Maemo Leste.

Maemo Leste for N950 and N9 (currently broken).
Devuan for N950 and N9.

Mobile devices with mainline Linux support - Help needed with documentation.

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." - Henry Spencer
 

The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to wicket For This Useful Post: