[Insight-users] GUI & ITK : Licenses

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Arash,

The reason why we recommend FLTK over wxWindows (now wxWidgets)
is the license:

          http://www.wxwidgets.org/newlicen.htm

wxWidgets' license is basically a LGPL, and therefore has
unnecessary restrictions on the use of the software.

The ITK community has committed to a BSD-like license that is
much more open than LGPL.


FLTK has a reduced LGPL license which in practice comes down
to be equivalent to BSD.

             http://www.fltk.org/COPYING.php

They took GPL and removed the stickiness out of it by declaring that:

1) deriving from FLTK classes do not contitues derivative work
2) static linking to FLTK libraries do not constitute derivative work


---


Note that this is only a reason for us to "recommend" FLTK or
suggest its use. However, ITK is *FULLY* independent of any GUI.
You can use ITK with wxWidgets, MFC, FLTK, Qt, Tcl, Java, or any
other system that provides GUI functionalities. It is up to you
to choose what GUI library you use for your application.


----

LGPL made sense in the early days of the Open Source movement,
when people didn't believe that it was a good idea and therefore
needed to be *forced* to release their source code.  We are well
beyond that stage, now that companies such as IBM recognize the
value of open source and support the community. We are also in a
new age where US federal funding agencies encourage and sometimes
*require* researchers to make their code publicly available. At
this point, the restrictions of LGPL are unnecessary and in fact
result in a barrier for the adoption of open source software in
commercial applications.



    Regards,



       Luis



---------------------------------
Arash Jahangir wrote:

> Luis and thread,
> Is there a reason why FLTK is often recommended instead of wxWindows set 
> (wxPython, wxWidgets, wxGlade, etc?)  From what I have read wxWindows is 
> the most mature and most feature rich free toolset?
> 
> Any pros and cons?
> 
> tia
> Arash
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Luis Ibanez" <luis.ibanez at kitware.com>
> To: "Chaman Singh Verma" <csv610 at yahoo.com>
> Cc: <Insight-users at itk.org>
> Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 7:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [Insight-users] GUI & ITK
> 
> 
>>
>> Hi Chaman,
>>
>>
>>
>>      ITK is independent of the GUI.
>>
>>
>>
>> You can select the GUI library of your preference,
>> and interface ITK to it using Command/Observers and
>> events.
>>
>>
>> We tend to recomend FLTK because it has a license
>> as open as ITK.  However, it is clear that Qt and
>> MFC can be used for creating nice GUIs too.
>>
>>
>> If you plan to use Qt, you must pay particular
>> attention to their licensing scheme, because it
>> is quite unique.
>>
>>
>>
>>    Regards,
>>
>>
>>
>>       Luis
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------
>> Chaman Singh Verma wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Luis,
>>>
>>> Do you know any GOOD GUI ( Qt ) for ITK. ?
>>>
>>> csv
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Insight-users mailing list
>> Insight-users at itk.org
>> http://www.itk.org/mailman/listinfo/insight-users
>>
>>
> 
> 
>