20140118 (Saturday, 18 January 2014)

New ideas on docs/tickets/79. Moved a miscellaneous question from docs/tickets/16 into a new ticket docs/tickets/91. I plan to update the documentation before actually switching to the LGPL. The actual switching is a routine work and comes as the last and “official” step. Before this I’d like to have clear and documented interpretation.

One thing is to surf about it:

• Using Python module on LGPL license in commercial product

• The LGPL and Java

Another thing is to think about it (or to write down thoughts):

I imagine you are a Python programmer and want to write some commercial software package, and you want to use Lino as a framework. Concretely you will write Python code which imports things from Lino. That’s okay and that’s what I wanted to make possible by switching from GPL to LGPL.

The LGPL (unlike the BSD) then says that you may not make a copy of Lino itself or any part of it and turn it into proprietary software.

Let’s imagine for example that you don’t use Lino but stumble over my The Human mixin tutorial and want to use this in a proprietary plain Django application. You can’t do that directly because it requires the ChoiceList class, an integral part of Lino. You then start to work many hours, and because you are clever, you manage to reimplement the ChoiceList concept without requiring Lino, you have rewritten a new and better implementation of my lino.mixins.human module.

And now you want to use this in a proprietary package? I say “Sorry, but you will need to prove that you did not copy any part of Lino. And that’s rather utopic because of course (every Python programmer can confirm it) you have been looking at my source code, and of course you have been copying parts of it.” You may hide your deed by changing variable names, reorganizing or obfuscating your code and so on, but I (or rather some of my successors, because I personally don’t imagine that I would waste my time with this kind of activity) might discover your product and suspect you of the above and try to prove that you did so. So don’t do that if you are a professional. Don’t copy LPGL licensed code into your proprietary product.

Possible questions:

• But where is the limit between these two usages? Aren’t the example files and tutorials a part of Lino, too?

  That’s why example files don’t have an LGPL copyright header. The lack of a copyright header indicates that that you may copy it and base even non-free work on it.

• But for example the Writing Python fixtures tutorial invites me to have a look at and get inspired by certain fixture files, and these files do have a copyright header.

  In general one can say: as long as your proprietary application uses Lino, there’s no danger. The dangerous thing is to not use Lino but to offer some proprietary product which looks suspiciously similar to Lino.

First logos for Lino

Ta-daa! Ly finally took a few hours and crystallized our thoughts about a logo for Lino (docs/tickets/94) into something visible. Here a series of four working drafts:

The logo represents a tree, but also reminds a diagram with linked objects.

Lino applications live, they grow slowly, they are long-term investments into a sustainable system.

Comments are welcome.

My current favourite is b (that’s why it is already visible in the sidebar).

Sphinx tools for writing language courses

After a meeting with Jorma Ihalainen, I created a ticket on docs/tickets/92. This will have to wait at least until february.