Dear Urs;
I gratefully appreciate your work on LilyPond. Because of your friendly
and affectionate way of sharing your knowledge in this mailing list - as
I was allowed to experience it in the past - I also want to believe that
OpenLilylib is valuable. Personally, I refrained from familiarizing
myself with it. The reason was not, that I indeed could not quickly
activate a 'Hello-World' "song". Even higher entry thresholds usually do
not prevent me from diving into special areas of programming. The reason
I ended up putting OpenLilyLib aside was its license model.
OpenLilyLib is licensed under the GPL. Thus, the copyleft effect forces
that all Lilypond files which include OpenLilyLib files, have also to be
distributed under the terms of the GPL. Moreover, due to the fact, that
Lilypond is the source code, which will be compiled (into scores), one
also has to respect the GPL rules of distributing compiled versions of
the code.
We had this discussion a year ago and I won't repeat the details. The
last time it ended in a kind of unfruitful shitstorm which did not help
anyone. But if you now look for supporters, you have to see that your
license model reduces the list of candidates: They must be familiar with
music, they must love beautifully designed musical text, they must be
able to program scheme (LISP) code (in fact not the most widely used
programming language) and they must be willing to require the others to
distribute their music under the terms of the GPL.
Nearly all other GPL licensed programming libs/programs had the same
problem and found solutions. Linus invented the "explicit syscall
exception" for his kernel, openjdk was released under the "GPL with
classpath exception". That is why I would like to propose again to
re-license the OpenLilyLib under the terms of the LGPL. Or, if that is
not possible, to link the lib with a kind of an "include exception" with
the purpose, to explicitly prevent the including musical scores from
also having to be released under the terms of the GPL.
I think that such a clarification would invite collaborators. At least I
would definitely consider, to transfer my harmoni.ly into OpenLilyLib -
as soon as such a re-licensing has reliably been implemented (= agreed
by all copyright holders) .
with best regards and - again - many thanks for your work in the past
Karsten
On 21.09.20 17:24, Urs Liska wrote:
Hi all,
...
I can understand why this view is not shared by everyone, most likely
simply because too much about OLL is obscure or unknown,...
At this point openLilyLib is completely dependent on my availability,
...
Therefore I'm looking not for a new maintainer but for more people
engaging in the project, to build a community around it that can at
some point continue without my aid.
...
Best
Urs
--
Karsten Reincke /\/\ (+49|0) 170 / 927 78 57
Im Braungeröll 31 >oo< mailto:k.rein...@fodina.de
60431 Frankfurt a.M. \/ http://www.fodina.de/kr/
