Licensing of a GPL Application
I am developing a website creation tool (ex. CMS), designed for teachers, and decided on licensing under the GPL, as I have seen many cases of software under the GPL. After coding for a while, I realized that I wanted to include software that was under the LGPL (tinyMCE).
Would I be able to license the software under the GPL, and include LGPL software inside, through a JavaScript library?
Also, what would be required in licensing, could I just copy over the files from the software downloaded? (I doubted this, but was told so by another programmer)
Also, if anyone has other info that would be good to know about the licensing, it would be appreciated.
If I understand this correctly, you are making a library under the GPL, and you want to ship LGPL software inside this library?
That is perfectly possible. In fact, the LGPL explicitly states that this is legal.
You may convey a Combined Work under terms of your choice that, taken together, effectively do not restrict modification of the portions of the Library contained in the Combined Work and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications, if you also do each of the following: (emphasis added, see license)
However, if I'm not mistaken LGPL is almost the same but with extra clause that the code may be used in binary form linked to a non-(L)GPL program but JavaScript libraries are never in binary form so why did the other author license his code under LGPL instead of GPL?
But practical, you can just copy over the code. I think you must keep the original license notice intact, though I'm not sure since you are also licensing under (L)GPL.
I wanted to double check the answer given by nightcracker before distributing anything (and possibly breaking laws, not that I seriously doubted the answer), so I emailed the FSF. Here is the response I got back:
Looking at the site and source code, TinyMCE seems to be licensed under LGPLv2.1 which is compatible with GPLv2 and GPLv3.
LGPLv2.1 has this to say about verbatim copying (from section 1): "You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library's complete source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and distribute a copy of this License along with the Library."
So go ahead and copy the files or the code, but also do at least the following:
Add/preserve (as needed) the TinyMCE copyright notice, I found one example in the header of the file editable_selects.js:
/**
* editable_selects.js
*
* Copyright 2009, Moxiecode Systems AB
* Released under LGPL License.
*
* License: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/license
* Contributing: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/contributing
*/
Then add a copy of LGPLv2.1 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html) to your distribution.
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