Re: Legal Risk (was Re: Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Russell Haley once stated:
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
>> > It was thus said that the Great Russell Haley once stated:
>> >>
>> >> Moreover, I haven't seen a single Lua package from Luarocks or
>> >> LuaForge or Github that was not MIT or more liberal
>> >
>> >   There are a few Lua modules that are LGPL (some even available via
>> > LuaRocks).  I just thought I should point that out since not everybody
>> > consideres the (L)GPL to be "liberal" [1].
>>
>> Excellent point. However, LGPL is only problematic if the licensee
>> modifies the original source code from the licensed package. As the
>> ActiveState distribution model is "managed binary packages", the end
>> user would not be able to modify the packages without invalidating the
>> ActiveState end user license (which I am reviewing now) so they do not
>> provide any licensing coverage that would "eliminate legal risk" from
>> an LGPL licensed package. Their statement is still patently[1]
>> incorrect.
>
>   They could easily by not including any (L)GPL modules in their
> distribution.

LGPL or not, their licensing model precludes a licensee violating the
LGPL as a concern. Their EULA only covers ActiveState supported
software, which is defined as a specific build distributed by them
(this is the point I am investigating for clarification).

Russ