On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 01:10:09AM +0100, Matěj Cepl wrote:
Hi,
I was contemplating to use LGPL for a small project of mine (in the
end I've decided otherwise for other reasons) but I was again struck
by the sheer nonsense of attaching 481 lines long COPYING.LGPL to
194 lines long script. Would there be anything wrong with replacing
the standard LGPL copyright blurb with this acknowledging an
existence of the Internet?
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
A copy of the full GNU Lesser General Public License is
available at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses\
/lgpl-2.1.html (or some better URL).
Not if you're the original licensor of the work in question.
Otherwise, the orthodox and, it seems, generally accepted
best-practices view is that you actually do have to include a copy of
the license text.
The FSF has even provided a decent policy argument over this: there
are still many people in the world who have no or unreliable net
access, yet such people may receive copies of (L)GPL-licensed software.
Where the orthodox view has absurd results (some uses of the GPL on
JavaScript or fonts come to mind) then I think a different answer may
be reasonable. (See RMS's paper on the "JavaScript Trap" from a few
years ago.) But I wouldn't consider it necessarily absurd to include a
longer license text with a shorter script. It may call into question
the choice of the LGPL to begin with though. (That may not be an
unreasonable guideline: for a new project, never use a license that is
lengthier than the code you would be placing under it.)
Incidentally I believe there is a scholarly article by a UK lawyer (I
believe Neil Brown) that addresses this subject in serious detail,
published, I believe, in a past issue of IFOSSLR, so it should be
readily available.
- Richard