[FEATURE] Licensing permission for open-source projects that (seemingly) cannot comply with LGPL terms due to interfacing with commercial data #92
Labels
Needs: Doc
Improvements or additions to documentation
Needs: Help
Extra attention is needed
Priority: Low
Not a big problem...
Status: Wontfix
This will not be worked on
Type: Enhancement
New feature or request
Background:
I am part of a group working on an open-source (MIT-licensed) project, Archipelago, that adds networking and shared progression to video games. Under the terms of the LGPL, required data to run a program must be released in non-LGPL combined works that link LGPL software.
Problem:
A different gaming project was informed by the Free Software Foundation that in order for their project to be compliant, the commercial video-game ROM that their project modified needed to be included. This is obviously not possible, as users need to use their own purchased games for ours and others' projects to remain legal. We are unsure of whether this LGPL ruling applies to our project (or if the licence would hold up in this way in court), but this possible forced noncompliance being the case, we are not eager to include software that might lead to legal issues down the line.
Solution:
I am hoping that
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might be made available to our project or projects in similar positions to our project, to the extent that thefrozendict
developers are comfortable doing so. For example, "we thefrozendict
team, licensefrozendict
for video-game modding projects to usefrozendict
if complying withfrozendict
's licensing in all ways but the redistribution of the video games being modified or the hardware/software required to run those games".Some other solutions to this might be (where the above is #2):
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team for Archipelago to usefrozendict
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's licensing in all ways but the redistribution of the video games being modified or the hardware/software required to run those gamesfrozendict
team for open-source video-game modding projects to usefrozendict
if complying withfrozendict
's licensing in all ways but the redistribution of the video games being modified or the hardware/software required to run those gamesfrozendict
team for projects to usefrozendict
if complying withfrozendict
's licensing in all ways but the redistribution of video games or hardware/software/data that development members have no control overThank you for your time and consideration of this request, as well as your continued efforts on the
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library.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: