Re: [eigen] New Licensing FAQ

[Daniel Stonier <d.stonier@xxxxxxxxx>]

2010/1/28 Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 2010/1/27 Rohit Garg <rpg.314@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> Seems good enough.
>>
>> It'd be interesting to know which commercial companies/products are
>> using eigen, if it is possible to list them on the wiki.
>
> Let's be very careful before listing companies on the wiki! They may
> not want the world to know what libraries they are using, especially
> when this is for internal usage.
>
> Even if a company is using Eigen publicly, I'd still ask for
> permission before mentioning them prominently on our main page.
>
> I'll write to you privately to let you know :)
> Benoit
>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Right now we are fishing some rather big fish who have uninformed
>>> concerns about the LGPL licence. So I thought that I'd rewrite the
>>
>> Let's hope your fishing skills are one of the best :)
>>> corresponding FAQ in a very redundant way, so that everyone find what
>>> he's looking for. So now, there's
>>>  - general questions on the LGPL
>>>  - specific questions for proprietary software
>>>  - specific questions for BSD-licensed software
>>>
>>> It's here:
>>> http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Licensing_FAQ
>>>
>>> I'm interested to know if you disagree or if you can correct my English....
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Benoit, from the amateur legal department
>>>

You've already got us on your web page (Yujin Robot), but as an aside,
had an interesting development some 3-4months ago with regards to
eigen.

We were partnering with a much bigger company to develop a product and
I've been using Eigen to drive the mathematics under the hood for
quite some time when all of a sudden their legal team wanted to know
all the specifics about what we're using.

I've been careful about our code practices, making sure we never
copy/paste/modify code and pushing for upstream changes when needed so
we should never get in trouble, but Eigen turned into a veritable
volcano within the space of a week. It was quite amusing watching
events unfold. First email from their lawyers after we sent them a
list of BSD/LGPL'd libraries we were using, and within the space of
two sentences, (quoting) 'we will not support anything to do with
those anti-patent fundamentalists.'

And I found myself a little confused about exactly who was the
fundamentalist... :P

Anyway, turned out their legalese had adopted a blanket rule approach
to LGPL3 in particular. The company had been in trouble with licensing
before, mostly due to ignorance...and had adopted blanket policies
that kept in line with their naivety.

In the end, our project would have required a major overhaul and
rescheduling at that point and our managers as well as theirs
convinced their legalese that their poliical motivations towards GNU
were not as important  as project schedules and budgets.

Anyway, Im happy say we're still enjoying eigen. My company even let
me open up our control library which is starting to get some of the
eigen stuff ported across to it (
http://snorriheim.dnsdojo.com/redmine/wiki/ecl ).

Oh, and we're also using it in tandem with RoS as we start to plan our
new platforms.

Congratulations on the job by the way!

Regards,
Daniel Stonier.

PS: I suspect some companies may be hesitant to use LGPLV3's as it has
not been out in the wild for too long yet. Especially the older, more
conservative companies who are missing the boat and concept behind
open source and are still clinging to old paranoia's.

-- 
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Home: http://snorriheim.dnsdojo.com/
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