LGPL clarification

[Frank Hecker]

Bryan George wrote:
> MITRE (and similar organizations) regularly develop infrastructure
> libraries that we would like to see used in both non-commercial and
> commercial contexts, and that we would like to be considered standards,
> de facto or otherwise.  For these reasons, I have taken a very keen
> interest in OSS licensing in general, and the LGPL in particular.

Incidentally, you may be aware of this already, but Mitre has already
created its own open source license, for use with the publicly released
version of the Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) software:

http://cvw.mitre.org/cvw/licenses/source/license.html

The Mitre CVW license agreement is basically a dual license scheme
involving the GPL and the Mozilla Public License, plus some
Mitre-specific language relating to the fact that the software was
developed under US government contract, plus a provision for copyright
assignment of changes sent back to Mitre.

You couldn't use the Mitre CVW license as is, because it is specific to
CVW; also, to be up to date the license should refer to version 1.1 of
the MPL, not version 1.0.  However with changes it might be suitable for
your purposes; as an MPL/GPL dual license scheme it has similar features
to those Karsten Self mentioned in connection with his proposed GPL/BSD
dual license scheme.  Plus the Mitre CVW license has been certified as
OSI-compliant, and also has been reviewed and approved by Mitre
management and legal counsel, so I suspect a variant of it would be able
to get similar approval relatively easily.

Frank 
-- 
Frank Hecker            work: http://www.collab.net/
frank at collab.net        home: http://www.hecker.org/