[wx-discuss] wxWeb Port licensing and naming

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:49:45 -0700 John Wilmes <wilmesj at reed.edu> wrote:

JW> Hi all,

 Hi John and welcome!

JW> Before I can begin, there are a few issues that need to be cleared up
JW> that require community input. The first is licensing. As the abstract
JW> states, I'm hoping to implement the port as a wrapper around the Wt
JW> toolkit ( http://jose.med.kuleuven.ac.be/wt/Home.fcg ). Unfortunately,
JW> this toolkit is licensed under the GPL. This is less of a problem for
JW> web apps
[... but still a problem]

 In addition, if Wt author decides to change the licence to GPL3 later this
will close all the current loopholes which currently allow to write closed-
source web applications using GPL code.

JW> Does anyone have any legal insight into this problem? Is it acceptable
JW> to limit the possible business models of applications compiled against
JW> the web port by using a GPL toolkit as the foundation? I've asked the Wt
JW> devs to please consider relicensing it as LGPL, but if they are not
JW> receptive to the idea, then we need to consider the consequences of
JW> using the GPLed library vs. starting from scratch.

 Indeed, I was going to suggest exactly what you did as many people choose
GPL without thinking too much about it and so might be amenable to changing
the licence to LGPL. Of course, if Wt developers chose GPL because they do
understand the implications, the chances of it happening are slim. Please
let us know about their reply.

 If they disagree, then I'm afraid that in the long term we'd really need
to have our own, non-GPLd, backend. But I don't think doing everything from
scratch during the couple of months you have for GSoC is realistic, is it?
So what about starting by using Wt but try to abstract dependencies on it
so that it would be possible to either replace it with another library or
rewrite [of subset of] it [that we use] ourselves? Of course, I have no
idea about how this port will be structured and work so maybe it's
impossible to do it like this... In fact, it would be really great if you
could post to wx-dev and/or create a page in wxWiki explaining how all this
is going to work, I'm very curious about it.


JW> Additionally, I'm not sure what to name the port. wxWeb seems like a
JW> natural name

 I think wxWeb should be ok. If using Wt is rally the defining
characteristic of the port (i.e. it can't be used without it/with anything
else) then Bryan's wxWt proposal is another logical choice.

 Regards,
VZ


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