Open CASCADE Technology changes its license to GNU LGPL

Dear all,

OPEN CASCADE SAS is pleased to inform you that the next version of Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) - 6.7.0 - will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1.

We sincerely hope that licensing of OCCT under LGPL will be appreciated and welcomed by the whole community of OCCT users as one more remarkable step towards wider promotion and adoption of OCCT in the world of Open Source software.
This relicensing will not change the license of already published OCCT versions up to 6.6.0.

On behalf of OPEN CASCADE SAS,
Forum supervisor

Roman Lygin's picture

Great to see this happening at last!
Congratulations and thank you, guys!

Given that it will be LGPL2.1 could you please clarify if the explicit inline and template exception be added ?

For instance, Qt did address that in 2009 upon community feedback which pointed to this issue of LGPL2.1. More can be read here - http://www.qtcentre.org/archive/index.php/t-23376.html, https://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2009/01/14/nokia-to-license-qt-under-lgpl/, https://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/source/cb28e6ba28baff4d7f90fa468ea939fd24....

Hopefully the spirit of this move does reflect that, so this is rather formal check.

Thank you again,
Roman

Forum supervisor's picture

Hello, Roman!

OCCT will be licensed under LGPL 2.1 with exception. Here is the text of this exception, for review and possible comments:

Open CASCADE exception (version 1.0) to GNU LGPL version 2.1.

The object code (i.e. not a source) form of a "work that uses the Library"
can incorporate material from a header file that is part of the Library.
As a special exception to the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1,
you may distribute such object code incorporating material from header files
provided with the Open CASCADE Technology libraries (including code of
generic classes) under terms of your choice, provided that you give
prominent notice in supporting documentation to this code that it makes use
of or is based on facilities provided by the Open CASCADE Technology software.

Best regards,
Forum supervisor

Roman Lygin's picture

Looks good to me. Thank you for paying attention to this and prompt response !