[Freegis-list] Lx-Viewer (DWG viewer for Linux)

[Guy Edwards]

If you hold fire for 8 hours or so, the main developer will hopefully be
on the list to answer the questions.

On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 22:00, Jan-Oliver Wagner wrote: 
> I am concerned with the problem that lx-viewer actually can not be
> used for any commercial purpose (as it should be the case for Free Software).

It's not a great situation if I've got it right but it can be used
commercially. If a company currently wanted to distribute lx-viewer as a
commercial product, including the opendwg libraries they would have to
be a commercial associate member of the opendwg alliance (or at least
one person would). This requires:

"You make a timely payment of a one-time enrollment fee and first-year
membership dues totaling $1,000. This fee entitles your organization to
a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free object code license to use the
currently available version of the OpenDWG libraries in a commercial
product."

..Which is pretty expensive for a small program! To be fair the project
just sprung out of a desire to be able to view DWG files on Linux, I
don't think anyone ever had this in mind and this is the first time
anyones mentioned a problem (that I know of). 

> The situation is even more problematic than the KDE/qt case was.
> Also I am pretty sure that things will not improve if not worked on.