Dear Roberto, thank you for your clarifying email. Roberto Bagnara schrieb:
Oscar Slotosch wrote:
Dear PPL Developers,
as you know Ernst Sassen is buidling a Java interface (and an Abstract Model Interpretation) for the free AutoFOCUS tool.
Dear Oscar and Ernst,
what do you mean, exactly, by "free"? For instance, judging from http://autofocus.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/autofocus-bin/download, it seems that AutoFOCUS cannot be downloaded without registering. Moreover, from the download page it is not clear in which format (source or binary) and license the tool is made available.
"free" means "free of charge". The source code is not available (publishing this 10 year old java code would be not usefull). Currently AutoFOCUS2 (a complete redesign of AutoFOCUS) is build. http://www4.in.tum.de/~af2/ There are discussions of making af2 "more free" than AutoFOCUS, e.g. with a LGPL or GPL, but no decision has been made upon this point.
Since the experiments looks very promissing, we currently consider to make a product for commercial tools out of it.
However your licence GPL prevents using your library for hat purpose.
If you would use the less restrictve LGPL (from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt) as licence, we could use your PLL fort hat purpose.
How do you think about that?
We are happy that experiments with the PPL look very promising, to the point of making you think about commercial products. However, the PPL is not released under the GNU General Public License by chance. I will spare you all the philosophy behind such a choice and go straight to the issue you are probably more interested in. Suppose we release the PPL to you under the LGPL: how would you contribute back to our project then?
e.g. by adding a Java interface for the PPL (based on JNI)
There are basically two ways you can have the PPL: under the GPL, in which case you will contribute back with your source code if you decide to release; or under an alternative licensing scheme, in which you will contribute back by funding our research (post-doc positions, PhD studentships, equipment, travel money...).
This could also be an interesting option. Currently we are only evaluating the method in a research project/thesis. If the methods works well, we will start in calculating the business case (additional development costs, possible product price, number of customers, licence costs for used licences,...). We will surely ask you for the price of the PPL library when doing this, but currently there is no need to exchange numbers for us.
Saluti di Monaco, Oscar & Ernst
Salutti di Monaco,
Oscar & ErnstSaluti da Parma! All the best,
Roberto