On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 13:17, Chris Green wrote:

For example, is a subclass a derivative work? By the LGPL, it seems to be since it's combined completely with the code that is under the LGPL.

Chris, Thanks for your questions. Your concerns are well-founded. However, they are thankfully soon to be irrelevant. Googling the twisted-python archives will give you some background on the intention and implications of the LGPL as it applies to Twisted. However, the LGPL was originally selected as Twisted was largely code that I wrote personally and many of the interested parties were large corporations with no experience, knowledge, or interest in open source. I wanted a license which was not terribly restrictive but still required those companies to do investigation into the license, requiring in so doing that they become at least marginally involved in the community process. In that, the confusing wording of the LGPL as it regards Python code was an asset. It would be a halfway accurate statement that I selected the LGPL exactly because it doesn't make any sense. Now we live in a different world than what Twisted was born into. First of all, middleware vendors know what Twisted is and who I am, which is a bit of a shift :-). More importantly, IBM, a massive bastion of technological conservatism, has embraced open source. By doing this, they have sent a message to corporate lawyers everywhere that they need to be aware of the free/open source software phenomenon and be able to react appropriately to different licenses. More and more companies are aware of the need to interact with the community regardless of whether it's necessary. Finally, Twisted is no longer a personal effort of my own. It is truly a community project; in fact, I think I am falling far behind exarkun in terms of number of lines committed :). The community is large enough to self-sustain without forcing new users to step forward because of an inconvenient license. For these reasons, and also to facilitate contribution by those who have the right to release their own work as open source but NOT to consign copyright to it (such as students at and employees of MIT), we are going to be switching to an MIT-style (no pun intended) license soon. The real work is going to be filing the verbose license statement off every source file in the tree and replacing it with a new one. This has been a long time in coming - the decision was finally made at PyCon this year and I'm sorry the change hasn't been implemented yet. On that note, I think we should change the license text at the top of each file to simply refer to the TWISTED-LICENSE file in the distribution or something like that, rather than including disclaimers itself.