[Discuss] Fwd: [OpenSCAD] License for scad files

[Bryan Bishop]

From: Johannes Reinhardt <jreinhardt at ist-dein-freund.de>
Date: Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 4:55 PM
Subject: [OpenSCAD] License for scad files
To: "openscad at rocklinux.org" <openscad at rocklinux.org>


Hi everybody,

while working on BOLTS, I started to think about licensing and scad
code and realised that this is a quite complicated topic. I am not a
lawyer, so I struggled quite a bit with that. Licenses are of some
importance to BOLTS, because I want to make sure, that existing code
can be incorporated with little effort, and for that I have to make
sure that this is legally possible.

I reached a state where I think I understood and then tried to write it
up:

http://jreinhardt.github.io/BOLTS/doc/general/licensing.html

However, today I thought about it from another perspective and
struggled again, so I decided to ask for your expertise, maybe you can
point out if I misunderstood something.

The main problem for me is that scad code is somehow both code and
content. On the one hand one can see a scad file as something that is
a description of an object, just like a stl file. If you look at it
like that, then a CC license makes perfect sense.

On the other hand, scad code is very much code. You can have a scad
library that is not a description of an object. For that, I feel, a
license tailored towards code, like the GPL or LGPL is better suited.
MCAD for example is LGPL.

But CC and (L)GPL are incompatible, which means that one cannot use them
together. Unfortunately, a lot of the scad code that is around is CC
licensed, because the standard license on thingiverse is CC. I find
this very unsatisfactory that the available scad code is fragmented
into legally incompatible subsets.

Greetings

Johannes


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