Using XIFF library for commercial application

Hello XIFF community,

Our customer likes to have Flash-based chat application. We’re looking for using XIFF together with some Jabber server for this goals. The question is what the right way to licensing XIFF library for legal linkage in commercial application?

I’ve found that some years ago it was commercial license for XIFF, but now I’ve found nothing about it. As I understand LGPL license disallow to static linkage of library without opening whole project’s source code and RSL due startup-linkage nature can’t help in such situation.

Thank you.

I just briefly read parts of this article, “GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1” and since XIFF is a GNU Lesser General Public License and not the ordinary GPL, I would say that you can use it in a commerical product. It states, " We use this license [GNU Lesser General Public License] for certain libraries in order to permit linking those libraries into non-free programs." Look under the preamble for more info.

In all honesty, looking back on it now from a more informed perspective, LGPL may not have been the best choice. Yes, you can use it in commercial apps without problem (which was my reasoning for the LGPL), but since Flash technically doesn’t do dynamic linking (short of using a run-time shared library I suppose) it’s kind of a gray area. I’m not sure where the LGPL stands on compiling in the library vs. dynamic/runtime linking, but I’m pretty sure that the language “linking” means the latter.

Ideally, we should change to something like the Apache license in the future. Bottom line is … I’m one of the primary copyright holders and I encourage you to use it in any kind of app (commercial or free) that you want

@svoisenThank you very much, we’ve already begun making draft implementation of our system and XIFF + Jabbers server are exactly what we want.

If will improve or fix XIFF library during our development we’ll give changes back to the community.

Thank you again.

Perhaps the lisence switch could be made while changing the namespace to “org.igniterealtime” and putting out public version for download as 3 beta 2.

Before choosing the future lisence, perhaps some reading should be done beforehand:

http://opensource.org/licenses/category

How about having a poll with a deadline for the new lisence?