Re: Future of openLilyLib

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi Karsten,

> I gratefully appreciate your work on LilyPond. Because of your 
> friendly and affectionate way of sharing your knowledge in this 
> mailing list - as I was allowed to experience it in the past - I also 
> want to believe that OpenLilylib is valuable. Personally, I refrained 
> from familiarizing myself with it. The reason was not, that I indeed 
> could not quickly activate a 'Hello-World' "song". Even higher entry 
> thresholds usually do not prevent me from diving into special areas of 
> programming. The reason I ended up putting OpenLilyLib aside was its 
> license model.
>
> OpenLilyLib is licensed under the GPL. Thus, the copyleft effect 
> forces that all Lilypond files which include OpenLilyLib files, have 
> also to be distributed under the terms of the GPL. Moreover, due to 
> the fact, that Lilypond is the source code, which will be compiled 
> (into scores), one also has to respect the GPL rules of distributing 
> compiled versions of the code.
>
> We had this discussion a year ago and I won't repeat the details. The 
> last time it ended in a kind of unfruitful shitstorm which did not 
> help anyone. But if you now look for supporters, you have to see that 
> your license model reduces the list of candidates: They must be 
> familiar with music, they must love beautifully designed musical text, 
> they must be able to program scheme (LISP) code (in fact not the most 
> widely used programming language) and they must be willing to require 
> the others to distribute their music under the terms of the GPL.
>
> Nearly all other GPL licensed programming libs/programs had the same 
> problem and found solutions. Linus invented the "explicit syscall 
> exception" for his kernel, openjdk was released under the "GPL with 
> classpath exception". That is why I would like to propose again to 
> re-license the OpenLilyLib under the terms of the LGPL. Or, if that is 
> not possible, to link the lib with a kind of an "include exception" 
> with the purpose, to explicitly prevent the including musical scores  
> from also having to be released under the terms of the GPL.
>
> I think that such a clarification would invite collaborators.

Although the discussion has become quite extensive by now, two points 
strike me as not having been emphasized as clearly as they should be in 
my opinion (I'm sorry if I missed them) - one technical/legal, one social:

First, my impression is that, at the root of the discussion, there's a 
distinction that needs to be made more clearly between "including" and 
"\including". When I use an \include directive (e.g. for using the OLL 
framework in a score of mine), I am not incorporating code contained in 
the library into my own score, but telling LilyPond to execute the 
commands of a library that it is the user's duty to make sure can be 
(legally) found on my computer. Not only am I using that library as kind 
of a black box (in that I only know how to use its API, without caring 
about or building on details on its implementation), but I am also not 
"including" the library in a literal sense into my own work (namely, my 
.ly file).
Instead, I create a .ly file that happens to be only compilable (using 
LilyPond) by people who also manage to (legally) get hold of a copy of 
the library - in case of OLL, a feat easily accomplished since OLL is 
GPL and distributed via github.
Or, to put it in a nutshell: Your remarks sound as if you think that 
"\include"ing a library means "including" it into your work, which I 
dispute.

Second - and this is what, frankly, makes me feel sad about your 
endeavour: I think it can be fairly said that your interpretation of the 
legal matter at hand does not seem to be shared by most of the folks on 
the lilypond-user mailing list. Of course, you're perfectly entitled to 
stick to your interpretation and, on that basis, decide that you do not 
want to participate in the OLL development. But in your remarks I 
quoted, you seem to imply that there might be others (and lots) of 
potential contributors that are kept from participating for the same 
reasons that you state for yourself.
I think that's not doing justice to a community (and I'm assuming here 
that a quite large percentage of the people most familiar with LilyPond 
and most capable of handling it, and tweaking and extending it, are 
actually active, at least intermittently, on lilypond-user) that 
continually strikes me with the enormous generosity of its members. I'm 
continually astonished, awed and humbled by the amount of expertise 
shared on lilypond-user on a daily basis, coming from people who provide 
many lines of non-trivial scheme code without ever claiming copyright. 
(A dangerous stance! you might say, yet their behaviour seems to make 
clear that they intend their ideas to be used by whoever might make use 
of them.) I know perfectly well that there might be bloodcurling legal 
difficulties looming as soon as only one of the regular contributors 
raises the legal question of who's using his/her snippets in their own 
works and starts demanding attribution etc., but the fact remains: From 
all that can be seen on lilypond-user, your implication that 
legal/licence considerations might be what keeps more people from 
getting involved in a demanding technical project like OLL seems 
implausible and, frankly, offending.

Lukas