[Jdrew-all] jDREW and OO- jDREW moving to LGPL

[Spencer, Bruce]

Hi All:

Both jDREW and OO-jDREW are available as open source under GPL licencing. We are planning to make jDREW and OO-jDREW available by LGPL license. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html, so that our commercial partners can include these libraries in their products that are not open source (free to distribute).

We have considered this issue carefull. We are considering, by making this change, (1) whether  we are violating the rights of any other contributors, and (2) whether we are taking rights away from any of our existing users.
 
For (1) if there were other contributors, we would have to get them all to agree to change the licence.  In this case it is easy since there are no other contributors yet.
 
For (2) Since we are moving from GPL to LGPL we are not taking any rights away from existing users.  We are affording them new rights.  
 
Comments welcome; please post to this list.

Bruce Spencer
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Bruce Spencer
National Research Council Canada
46 Dineen Drive, Frederiction, New Brunswick, Canada, E3B 9W4

email: Bruce.Spencer at nrc.ca 
phone: 506-444-0384, fax: 506-444-6114

Adjunct Professor, University of New Brunswick
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bspencer

Group Leader: Internet Logic http://iit.nrc.gc.ca/il.html
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