LGPL vs GPL for Adapt Intent Parser

Plugins & Skills Intent Parsers
1

Hey Community,

We are coming up on the release of the Adapt Intent Parser this week. We were wondering what people thought about GPL vs LGPL for that piece of software? We are trying to ensure that people can use Adapt in their project regardless of whether everything is GPL or not.

Anyone have any intense insight into this? Is everyone going to hate us if we choose LGPL vs GPL? What do you think?

Thanks!

2

I like this quote
""
Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it.
’'
My vote goes to GPL

3

So does mine.

From what I understand, proprietary projects can still use it.
Android ecosystem uses GPLv2 projects for it’s core and then proprietary layers on top of it, so I don’t see why this wouldn’t work with Adapt.

4

I disagree with this quote for the sole reason that I don’t consider proprietary developers a group of people that we need and advantage over. My goals for open sourcing Adapt are two-fold:

  1. Provide cutting edge technology to the community
  2. Expose the technology to a community of people that may improve upon the technology.

By taking a stance against “proprietary developers”, you’re limiting your pool of potential contributors. Sure, there are a large group of proprietary developers that may take the software and contribute nothing back; that is a risk with all OSS, regardless of license. I am a proprietary developer in my professional life, and in that capacity actively avoid GPL code, as is in the best interest of my employer. However, that also prevents me from using, extending, or contributing to a large number of codebases that could benefit from another set of eyes.

In the end, I settled on LGPLv3 (and yes, as donor/maintainer of the code, this was my personal call) because I wanted more people to use and contribute. If Adapt ends up in the bowels of Oracle’s personal assistant somewhere down the road, I’ll consider it a sign of success for the technology, and not a fatal loss to the community.

#morepeoplearebetter

1 Like
5

ugh, why are hashtags so hard here?

6

Your arguments for doing so are good, and as you said, It’s your call.

If Adapt ends up in the bowels of Oracle’s personal assistant

heh

7

GPL of course, is more restrictive than LGPL, so anyone can still use Adapt but their modifications to the code must be open sourced as well, isn’t it?