Engwar

There comes a period in every year that licensing becomes an issue. Some project, somewhere on some list. The season came early for Axis2/C in the new year Dinesh list the question regarding the issue a user had.

Many free/open source apps does not bundle the dependent libraries with their tar ball mainly due the understanding that everyone could easily get the dependencies. Including them make the distribution bulky and you have to deal with gazillion of licensing issues. So it’s pretty easy to say that we use this library so please install that before installing ours.

A lot of people dislike GPL because if you even link against a GPLed library your program has to be released under the GPL as well. Luckily (for some people) FSF came up with LGPL that does not have this requirement. So, having a proprietary program linking to a LGPLed library is fine. Axis2/C does not link to a GPLed library so it can safely be released under the Apache license which BTW, can be used to develop proprietary program if that’s what you want.

I really like the idea of giving the choice to the users to do whatever they wish with a program/library and a license that does NOT restrict the freedom of the user by treating him as “users are idiots, so let’s make the software free by restricting their freedom from the license”.

Axis2/C also depends on OpenSSL for doing security stuff. Mark McLoughlin explains about the compatibility issues of the OpenSSL license with the GPL nicely. So bundling OpenSSL with Axis2/C would not only be just inconvenient, it’s a bloody pain in the arse. Since Axis2/C only links to it and since it does not contain any brain damaged clauses in it’s license there’s nothing to worry about. Also other libraries mentioned in the link pointed by Dinesh comes with licenses that allows you to build proprietary programs based on them so IMHO there’s no incompatibility issues with the Apache license which Axis2/C is released and the licenses of its dependent programs.