Re: [eigen] New Licensing FAQ

[Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Radu,

2010/1/27 Radu Bogdan Rusu <rusu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Hi all,
>
> Willow Garage (www.willowgarage.com) is one of these "companies" using Eigen
> (though we're more like a robotics incubator/lab at the moment as we're in a
> lucky situation of not having to generate revenue due to our
> founders/sponsors) as part of our ROS (Robotic Operating System) project
> (www.ros.org), which is completely open source, released under a BSD
> license.
>
> We've already exposed our Eigen dependency at http://www.ros.org/wiki/eigen,

Thanks for the link,

> and approximately 39 packages in our repository use it already (as of
> today).

We already mention Willow Garage and the ROS on our Main Page:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#Projects_using_Eigen

We are really proud of this!

> I went through the new FAQ and I found it readable and quite informative.
> Obviously, we at Willow would love to have all our software dependencies
> having BSD licenses, but since the world is not perfect we can live with
> LGPL too :). At least for now. :)

OK, if the LGPL license ever becomes such a big issue that you
consider switching to another library, please contact us first. We're
not likely to relicense to BSD, but we have plenty of arguments to
convince you not to discard Eigen for such a reason :) Basically,
before you do, ask if this will make a concrete difference for any of
your users, i.e. ask if any of your users really wants to be able to
do a proprietary fork of Eigen (given that proprietary _extensions_ of
Eigen are already possible), the answer is most likely to be "no" ;)

Benoit

>
> Cheers,
> Radu.
>
> Rohit Garg wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> | Radu Bogdan Rusu | http://rbrusu.com/
>
>
>