Hi (swish-e developers)

I'm coming in on the tail end of this thread...  
which is partly in response to the question mark 
I placed after my own comment that I was obliged  to 
make swishctl open source because of the GPL. 

Firstly, I think that the GPL and LGPL are both 
*good* licences. 

I am of two minds about the question. 

Firstly:

As an independent contractor, I used swish-e to 
fulfil a need for my client (a community organisation).
Both GPL and LGPL allow me to charge for this work 
which is good - otherwise I would have had to use 
an inferior proprietary solution....

As a contracted programmer, my client ends up owning the copyright
on swishctl (unless I explicitly contract to keep it).

But they don't have the skill base to continue development of it. 

The fact that swish-e was GPL meant that my source also became GPL - so
*I* can continue to work with it. 

If swish-e was LGPL then I would have no legal right to the code I just
wrote. 

For this reason - although it seems restrictive the GPL worked 
for me in this project. 

Secondly: 

If swish-e was LGPL - then I could have written swishctl as 
a closed source application and sold a licence to my client,
and possibly to others too. This is the traditional path for 
software companies - and potentially more sustainable 
economically (meaning I can keep working on swishctl). 
Of course then I may have to struggle with my conscience  
for taking the closed source path...

Anyway, thanks for a nice search engine - GPL or LGPL 
I'll support you either way.


Greg Ford

On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 10:38, Roy Tennant wrote:
> OK, if I read this right, all I need to do is to change the statement 
> on the web site (which is one SSI file) and be done with it, right? And 
> everyone goes home happy? If so, I may be able to escape this 
> discussion without resorting to hard liquor... Let me know if you 
> object, otherwise I'll assume you're ok with it. Thanks,
> Roy
> 
> On Wednesday, May 21, 2003, at 12:50 PM, David L Norris wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 13:08, jmruiz@boe.es wrote:
> >> So, if LGPL give us 1000 users and GPL 999; I prefer LGPL.
> >
> > For what it's worth that's pretty much my opinion.  SWISH was LGPL and
> > all of the source code still says it's LGPL.  Now that it's a library,
> > in particular, it probably should be LGPL.  Only thing that really
> > states GPL is the website and the license I include on Windows (which
> > can be changed easily ;).
> >
> > -- 
> >  David Norris
> >   http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
> >   ICQ - 412039