Here at the OGRE project we’re obviously keen open source advocates, but we also live in the real world and therefore always like to make sure our license policies reflect what our users want. Our aim is that OGRE should be legally uncomplicated to use, while preserving the vital core principles that in return for using it, users must pass on the rights they receive to others, and be encouraged to contribute back to the project.
We recently performed a review of our licensing policy, and have decided to add a some explicit exclusions to the standard LGPL license conditions. The most important of these from a user perspective is that linking OGRE statically into your application is now subject to the exact same conditions as dynamically linking it. By default the LGPL treats these cases differently, and as a result most people dynamically linked, but on review we decided that our principles were adequately served by applying the same conditions no matter what the linking type, while at the same time making our open source license requirements much easier to explain. We also added some explicit notes about other situations (inline headers, configuration file changes, subclasses in external modules) that were already fairly well understood in the community, but which deserved to be mentioned explicitly.
We still believe that the LGPL is the most appropriate base license for a large library like OGRE, but we think adding these exclusions will make everybody’s life easier. Full details of the exclusions are on our Licensing Page. These changes will come into effect for all releases after 1st March 2009, or for anyone using the Subversion copy now.