Re: [pygame] Licensing

["Brian Fisher" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

LGPL seems perfectly appropriate for pygame to me. SDL is LGPL as well, and seems to work fine for it. Is someone claiming that LGPL is undesirable for pygame in some way?

I believe the only time the license terms even matter for a game is when a game is distributed along with pygame - and then the "Combined Works" section (4) applies - so games that distribute a package including pygame would basically need to include the LGPL copyright in their distribution (4a-c), and the python import mechanism for using pygame seems to already be a "suitable shared library mechanism" (4d1) so no work there, and moreover the python import mechanism and py2exe and py2app are all well enough known that I don't think additional "installation information" is required to be able to replace the pygame included in a game distribution (4e)

So it seems to me, unless somebody is doing something weird with their game distribution, the only burden LGPL adds at all is to repeat the LGPL copyright info if you are distributing pygame along with your game.

So am I misinterpreting the license? Is one of the requirements the LGPL puts on pygame-using game distribution troublesome? If so, what would be better and why?

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 12:34 AM, techtonik <techtonik@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It's not about relationship of pygame to standard python library (between LGPL and Python licenses), but about obligations for games developed with pygame to pygame's sourcebase.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 1:57 AM, Chris <c4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Pygame isn't changing anything in the python codebase so there's no obligations to the standard python library.  Read the GPL.  No consequences for merely using python.

techtonik wrote:

Just a minor correction to avoid people be confused about Python itself. I
wonder if pygame accepted Python license - how many games were released
under it? I've reread LGPL once more and still unsure what consequences are
if it can be applied to libraries that are linked as a source code like
pygame and not inclide any header files.

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Chris <c4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

um... thanks but we're talking about licensing pygame projects, not the
python codebase.


techtonik wrote:

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 7:58 AM, James Paige <Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

 I notice LGPL is used on a lot of pygame projects.  Is that because

pygame itself uses LGPL?  It makes sense for pygame to use LGPL because
it's a huge, widely used library but it's not apparent as to why the
game projects themselves to use LGPL.

Yes, the fact that pygame, and python are both LGPL is a main reason why
many pygame games are LGPL.

Python is not LGPL - read http://www.python.org/psf/license/
In general - it is BSD-like in the way that you may use source or binaries
in any way you want and don't have to disclose your modifications, but you
should preserve the copyrights.

--anatoly t.

--
--anatoly t.