Forking an LGPL Project

[SuperMike]

What's the rules about forking an LGPL project? I only want to fork it and put it up on the web with some great docs, but in this case **NEVER** charge for it, and I don't mind putting an LGPL or GPL license on the fork.

[pmasiar]

What's the rules about forking an LGPL project? I only want to fork it and put it up on the web with some great docs, but in this case **NEVER** charge for it, and I don't mind putting an LGPL or GPL license on the fork.

Why you want to fork it if do not plan to make any changes? Just create the great docs and submit it to the project, or ask them to link to your docs if you want more control.

And of course if you are forking GPL or LGPL project you are *obliged* to keep the same license - you cannot change the original license, that's the whole point of it.

[SuperMike]

Oh, well, it's like this. Perhaps you misunderstand. I had an idea to take the source for the NGS language (apt-get install ngs-js), modify about 20% of it into something else entirely, rename it as "Polar" with a binary of "polar" that runs ".pol" script files, create some docs for it, and stick it up on the web in whatever is the appropriate license for the thing, along with sub-credits to the original contributors of NGS. I also *don't* plan to ever charge for it. I want to do this completely legit and legal per the LGPL. But I'm still reading and re-reading the LGPL, wondering exactly what it means for me. (NGS was built with LGPL.)

[psychicdragon]

Basically, provided you keep the credits intact and choose a compatible license there is no problem. It would be also be curteous to contact the original author just to let him/her know. In this case that may not be possible as it seems the project is no longer maintained.

[SuperMike]

Yeah, I'm trying to be very courteous. After all, I didn't write the original source and it was a massive amount of SWEET work once you look at it. (Perhaps much of it was autogenerated by lex and yacc, but the rest was not.) Anyway, I tried contacting this Bryan Bassett guy to explain my proposal. Seems he had some epileptic seizures (or perhaps he was joking on his blog about the epilepsy), but he had 2 car crashes that put him in traction. Anyway, he then got laid off in Washington (state). However, M$ then hired him to be an engineer and he jumped on that, saying he was going to do a lot of Perl work there. And that was the last we heard of him back in 2004. I hope he's still alive. So many people dying in car crashes and junk these days. His ngs-javascript.org domain was last re-registered back in May 2006.

[fct]

Keep the license, and only add yourself in the credits wherever you make changes. That's mostly it.