Horde3D

Hi guys,

are there any plans to offer a commercial non-(L)GPL license for interested developers? Similar to Ogre3d's commercial license which allows you to link the engine statically into your builds. I'm sure this wont be a quick thing, but I'd like to know if there are any plans going in that direction.

I carry this question around for quite some time, now I felt it's time to ask it. Thanks for your time.

To be honest, I can't see a real need for it, unless you are porting to a console where dynamic linking is unavailable.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

We don't have plans to offer commercial non-LGPL licenses in the forseeable future. I'm really not keen on the legal involvement (contracts, licensing terms and so on) that comes with licensing the engine. Furthermore, we would need the written agreement of all contributers, although that is not so much of an issue at the moment since most of the contributions so far are smaller bugfixes or other little improvements.

In some rare cases, the LGPL could really be too restrictive. Not only for consoles (although you can use dynamic linking on the XBox360 without problems, for PS3 static linking is better) but also when integrating commercial third party libraries (e.g. SpeedTree) which don't allow to reveal their interface. If someone really has such issues he can contact us and we can try to find a custom solution, if it is a promising project which would help Horde to progress in some way (I think that's the actual purpose of the LGPL, to help a project evolve).

That sounds pretty fair. Thanks for the feedback.

Cheers,
Michael