[tei-council] licensing on XSLT stylesheets

[Syd Bauman]

> You'll recall I asked late last year about this, and got a fair
> amount of unanimity that GPL was desirable. However, the oXygen
> folks argue pretty convincingly that the LGPL would be better for
> this sort of software. It would afford the protection we want, and
> not produce problems for people like oXygen.
> 
> I therefore propose to make a new release under an LGPL. Does
> anyone object?

So the stylesheets are a library being linked with the application,
eh? Well, if that's the case, the open source fanatic part of me
wants to say "no", we should stick up for open source and stick with
GPL. But the text encoding TEIer part of me says that anything we can
do to spread TEI is good, even if it means shaking hands with
(although not getting into bed with) proprietary software. And the
practical, reasonable side of me realizes that

a) TEI needs oXygen more than oXygen needs TEI. oXygen is not about
   to become open source. Thus, if we stay with GPL, oXygen will just
   drop the stylesheets, and TEI users will lose out.

b) The amount of benefit the open source community (primarily jEdit,
   here) gains by having access to TEI stylesheets when their
   proprietary competitor (oXygen) does not have such access is, I'm
   sorry to say, really very slight.

So, somewhat grudgingly, I'm inclined to say we should switch to
LGPL.

P.S.
----
The difference, BTW, is that GPL requires that any derivative
software, even if large parts of the resulting program are *not*
based on GPLed code, must be under the GPL itself. LGPL permits
derivative software to be under a proprietary license in some
circumstances.