Re: Future of openLilyLib

[Karsten Reincke]

Dear Urs;

I gratefully appreciate your work on LilyPond. Because of your friendly 
and affectionate way of sharing your knowledge in this mailing list - as 
I was allowed to experience it in the past - I also want to believe that 
OpenLilylib is valuable. Personally, I refrained from familiarizing 
myself with it. The reason was not, that I indeed could not quickly 
activate a 'Hello-World' "song". Even higher entry thresholds usually do 
not prevent me from diving into special areas of programming. The reason 
I ended up putting OpenLilyLib aside was its license model.

OpenLilyLib is licensed under the GPL. Thus, the copyleft effect forces 
that all Lilypond files which include OpenLilyLib files, have also to be 
distributed under the terms of the GPL. Moreover, due to the fact, that 
Lilypond is the source code, which will be compiled (into scores), one 
also has to respect the GPL rules of distributing compiled versions of 
the code.

We had this discussion a year ago and I won't repeat the details. The 
last time it ended in a kind of unfruitful shitstorm which did not help 
anyone. But if you now look for supporters, you have to see that your 
license model reduces the list of candidates: They must be familiar with 
music, they must love beautifully designed musical text, they must be 
able to program scheme (LISP) code (in fact not the most widely used 
programming language) and they must be willing to require the others to 
distribute their music under the terms of the GPL.

Nearly all other GPL licensed programming libs/programs had the same 
problem and found solutions. Linus invented the "explicit syscall 
exception" for his kernel, openjdk was released under the "GPL with 
classpath exception". That is why I would like to propose again to 
re-license the OpenLilyLib under the terms of the LGPL. Or, if that is 
not possible, to link the lib with a kind of an "include exception" with 
the purpose, to explicitly prevent the including musical scores  from 
also having to be released under the terms of the GPL.

I think that such a clarification would invite collaborators. At least I 
would definitely consider, to transfer my harmoni.ly into OpenLilyLib - 
as soon as such a re-licensing has reliably been implemented (= agreed 
by all copyright holders) .

with best regards and  - again - many thanks for your work in the past

Karsten


On 21.09.20 17:24, Urs Liska wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> ...
>
> I can understand why this view is not shared by everyone, most likely
> simply because too much about OLL is obscure or unknown,...
>
> At this point openLilyLib is completely dependent on my availability,
> ...
> Therefore I'm looking not for a new maintainer but for more people
> engaging in the project, to build a community around it that can at
> some point continue without my aid.
>
> ...
> Best
> Urs
--
  Karsten Reincke    /\/\   (+49|0) 170 / 927 78 57
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