ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Bell <bell.jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, it is beginning to appear that I have been grossly misinformed about
the LGPL. It would not be the first time I've had to stick my foot in my
mouth, but in this case I am quite happy to do so, because this is most
excellent news (well, news to me anyway)!

Thank you very much for clearing this up! One related question, however -
will end users be able to make modifications to installed application
binaries? If so, does it require "rooting" the phone? This might be
relevant to this discussion in that often rooting a phone causes the
warranty to be invalidated. I'm assuming it's possible to make
modifications to application directories (for the purposes of recompiling
GPL apps or LGPL libraries, for instance) under some appropriate
super-user privileges without rooting the phone, is that correct?

Regards,
Jeremy




On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Kevin Krammer <anda.skoa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 2013-05-14, Jeremy Bell wrote:
> > There is more to it than providing the sources for the library the app
> > includes, at least for commercial applications.
> >
> > To summarize this:
> > http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/439136.html
> > 1) The application and the shared library must be distributed separately.
> > If the application and the shared library are distributed together (e.g.
> as
> > a bundled, self-contained app package), then the whole work (app +
> library)
> > is considered a "derivative work", similar to static linking the library.
>
> Even if this would be considered similar to static linking, I doubt this
> would
> change anything.
> The  LGPL does not distinguish between linking techniques as long as the
> recepient of the software can replace the LGPL licensed parts as they see
> fit.
> Obviously in order to be able to relink with a static library, the
> application
> itself must be available additionally as a static library itself.
> Inconvenient perhaps, but not impossible.
>
> > For the LGPL, that means your application code must be LGPL
>
> If that were true the code for Chrome and Safari would have to be LGPL.
> Both
> programs ship with WebKit bundled into a package.
> Same would be true for all WebKit using applications that are on a default
> iOS
> or Android image.
>
> > And, please note that nobody can use the LGPL license of the mono library
> > (or any other LGPL library) in an application distributed on iOS or
> Android
> > app stores. All use of mono on those platforms is via a commercial dual
> > license sold to them by the author of the library, Xamarin. The LGPL
> > license cannot be used with those app packaging models either.
>
> Well, there are Andriod apps [1] that use Qt/Andriod "Necessitas" which
> normally means using the Ministro [2] service which installs LGPL licensed
> Qt.
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin
>
> [1] http://grokbase.com/t/gg/android-qt/12ah3pxe4d/real-world-apps-using-
> necessitas
> [2]
> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.necessitas.ministro
>
> --
> Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
> KDE user support, developer mentoring
>
> --
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>
>


-- 
Jeremy Bell
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