As of October, 2006, AGG, the graphic library used in haiku, has changed license to GPL.
How does this affect Haiku development?
This was discussed on the mailing list. Stephan Assmus did contact the author - and I’m not sure anything came of that. It was decided that for Haiku’s purposes, the last version released under non-GPL version is adequate for a fully stable and usable system, as it was already a fairly mature codebase. Any issues that arise will be resolved as a fork of AGG.
Hi,
I just wanted to clarify something with regards to a possible “fork” of AGG 2.4. Right now, a copy of AGG 2.4 is living in the Haiku source tree, and it has been there for a long time with no known problems. If and when problems in the AGG code become known (which I highly doubt, it is very good code), we can fix them in our tree. I wouldn’t exactly consider this “forking” :-).
On top of that I want to point out that we are using a very small subset of the available features of AGG 2.4. Before it makes sense to fork and improve the last MIT licensed version of AGG, it makes more sense to fully explore what is already there. AGG 2.4 is already very feature rich and it will take some time before we hit any limits and find ourselves in a situation where we might want to extend AGG. On top of that, the dependencies on AGG are quite restricted to very few places in the Haiku source tree. In another words, should a more advanced, MIT licensed software framework be available at a time where we realize problems or limitations of AGG, it should be fairly easy to replace AGG as a backend in the places where it is being used.
Best regards,
-Stephan