OpenShot Video Editor

What motivate openshot team to move library licence from gplv3 to lgplv3?

Asked by Richard Leger

Hi,

Well done to all Openshot team for work accomplished ;-)

In regards of recent blog post http://www.openshotvideo.com/2014/07/june-july-development-update-part-1-or-3.html?m=1
Any chance you could explain motivation behind changing licence from GPLv3 to LGPLv3 or point to a reference post you may have provide more info already? It is by simple curiosity in regards of the following https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Ps: Wanted to post comment directly on blog but could not find out how to do so without creating a disqus account... which I don't really need.

Thanks,
Richard

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Jonathan Thomas (jonoomph) said : 		#1

Hi Richard,
Basically, I did not realize that by choosing GPLv3 on a library (i.e. libopenshot), that any project that links to my library creates a derivative work, and thus needs to also be licensed GPLv3. In real world terms, this means that many free and open-source projects will never use libopenshot, because it would require them to re-license their entire source code... which in many cases is not possible due to copyright shared by a large group of distributed people.

Unfortunately, this really only hurts other open-source projects. For example, it does not hurt end-users, since most don't care what kind of license a project uses. It does not hurt commercial businesses, since they can simply purchase a commercial license for libopenshot and JUCE (since I am choosing to dual license at the moment. Using GPLv3 on a library only hurts other open-source projects.

So, that was my primary motivation for switching to LGPLv3 for my library. OpenShot Video Editor will continue to be GPLv3, as that makes lots of sense to me, since other open-source projects have no ability to "link" to it (so to speak). I hope that answers your questions.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

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