[osg-users] OSGPL - Legal questions on version and compatibility

[Robert Osfield]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2019 at 10:42, Matthias Schütze <matthi.schuetze at gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently, I am checking the possibilities to update my company's proprietary application from using OSG 3.0.1 to use a newer version. On GitHub, I could see that with OSG 3.4 the license document changed from OSGPLv0.0 to OSGPLv1.0. There are only minor differences and I understand that the wxWindows exception still allows dynamic and static linking, even in a proprietary application.

Yes, you should be able to still use OSG-3.4.x/3.6.x in your
application, statically or dynamically linking.  The license change
does not change the intent of the licence.

>rsions (e.g. by the Free Software Foundation) and several hints on the OSG website.
>
> Question 1: Why is OSGPLv1.0 based on "LGPL-2.1-only" (instead of "LGPL" as OSGPLv0.0)?
>
> I assume that the licensee cannot change the underlying LGPL version from 2.1 to any later version (nor any former). Is this interpretation correct?

I simply updated to the modern versions of licenses.


> Question 2: Could the proprietary application link to both, OSG under OSGPLv1.0 and another shared library under LGPLv3?
>
> I am concerned about combining an LGPL-2.1-only-library and an LGPLv3-library since the resulting work has to use GPLv3 (according to David A. Wheelers "FLOSS License Slide", see online). I assume that this is only the case, when combining the source codes of the libraries. When using the libraries by dynamic linking, I assume that this combination is possible without any license compatibility adaptions, provided that
>
>
>          the OSGPLv1.0 license terms (source code distribution, copyright, warranty disclaimer etc.) are satisfied for OSG
>
>          the LGPLv3 license terms (source code distribution, copyright, warranty disclaimer etc.) are satisfied for the other shared library
>
>          the proprietary application can have its own license terms
>
>
>
> Could anybody please confirm or correct my understanding of these relations? Are there any other specifics for such a combination?

As far as I understand, you aren't mixing in OSG code with another
library with a different license, you are just linking to both so the
licenses shouldn't conflict with each other -  as long as you honour
the individual licenses with how you use them in your applications.

Robert.