Hi there, Here comes the rest of the story, and the steps we're taking. On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 09:30:39AM -0400, Jorge Arellano Cid wrote:

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 01:06:36PM +0200, Johannes Hofmann wrote:

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Hi Jorge,

do you plan to answer this mail?

Sorry I've been lost with other activities.

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My point here is that we should stick with fltk2 until there is an official release of fltk1.3.

Yes. I agree. We went with unreleased FLTK2 and it has caused lots of problems (despite statical linking).

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If there are license issues with fltk2 they should be handled between debian and the fltk community. Of course we could try to help.

It looks like FLTK2 is quite stalled. Of course we can knock the door again. Maybe this is also a good time to ask for fltk1.3's timeline again. The last time, the optimistic release date was near the middle of 2009.

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Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:40:03 +0200 From: Devid Antonio Filoni <devidfil@gmail.com> Subject: [Dillo-dev] Switch to fltk1.3? To: dillo-dev@dillo.org

Hi, is possible to switch to fltk1.3? I sent a lot of emails to fltk developers trying to get the license issue of fltk2 (http://www.fltk.org/str.php?L2198+P0+S-2+C0+I0+E0+Qlicense) fixed but I still (after months of sent emails) haven't gotten a reply. dillo is going to be removed from Debian and Ubuntu repositories because it depends on removed packages and the newest dillo release cannot be uploaded because fltk2 is not in the repositories and it cannot be accepted due to the license issue. Is possible to switch to fltk1.3 or to another toolkit please?

Thanks, Devid Antonio Filoni

Hi Devid,

We plan to switch to fltk1.3 soon. The point is to have a solid release date to start the port. When we started with fltk2 it was supposed to be released soon... :P

I'm writing to the fltk1.3 team. Stay tuned.

I wrote to Matthias Melcher and this is what happened:

[On Sep 2, Matthias wrote:]

OK, here is the history of the license additions which should make things clearer:

All initial authors of FLTK (Bill, Mike, myself) had commercial applications in mind or were actively working on them. GPL was out of question. LGPL mostly fit Bill's ideas, but it had to be shoe-horned so that "Nuke", the commercial product of his employer "Digital Domain" would be satisfied.

DD'd first problem was that they were afreid the Nuke would be seen as derived work and hence require the source to be opened (yes, I know, but that such is lawyer logic).

The second issue was that DD did not want t have to mention any of that brand new LGPL licensing stuff (LGPL was pretty much brand new 15 years ago and highly disputed).

Thirdly, Mike back then owned his own business, and he wanted to support FLTK, but avoid similar risks. IIRC he added the ammendments.

So here is my suggestion: I will not be able to completely remove the ammendments, but I doubt that there will be much of a fight if we change some wording. If I read the artikles right, the May version would be acceptable for FLTK 2. If that is so, I will push that through with the team. If neither wording works, please have someone suggest a version in the light of the explanations above.

Devid, you're surely in a better position to judge the legal aspect of using the May version of the license. At least you can ask Debian legal! If that's enough to get FLTK2 packaged, we can push it forward this way. If not, I can talk the problem with the fltk-1.3 development team, try to get a release estimation date and speed up the port to fltk-1.3 accordingly. AFAIU the 1.3 branch has no license issues. I'll be expecting your answer to get back to fltk devs. TIA. -- Cheers Jorge.-