3.2.0

Licensing of 2.0?

Hi. I'm working on the DynAPI project. I like what I see here. But DynAPI is LGPL, and ActiveWidgets is GPL. LGPL freely allows conversion to a modified source to GPL. But GPL prevents ever going back to LGPL. So you could borrow code from DynAPI (not that you necessarily would want to or need to), but DynAPI developers could not borrow code from ActiveWidgets. The two could be deployed side by side unmodified, but if modifications hook into both, it becomes less clear which license has precedence. For JavaScript, source code versus binary is already an ambiguous distinction, as the scripts are not compiled until they are run in the browser, but it's not an interactive process. So I don't know if GPL or LGPL is better. But since DynAPI aims to be an extensible library to be included in other web apps, it would seem LGPL is a closer match for those objectives. This doesn't mean someone can just take the code, change it, and not release or publish it anywhere, or else they're in violation of the LGPL. It just means they don't have to taint their proprietary code if they merely use the library unmodified. I draw the distinction not only to include modification of the given source files, but the creation or inclusion of source files that modify or overwrite sections of the API, as that is effectively equivalent to modifying the original source, due to the nature of JavaScript. But making proprietary widgets which do nothing more than call existing API routines without modifying them, those are allowed by LGPL and not by GPL.
warp9pnt9
August 24,

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