Licensing

Here is the reasoning behind the choice of licenses for NUI (GPL + proprietary)

1. NUI used to be LGPL but we never provided DLLs on any platform for technical reasons (NUI has quite a share of templates and templated code doesn’t make any sense with DLLs and the LGPL). I also never liked DLLs for many reasons (mainly related to the support nightmare they quickly become, been there, done that…).
2. LGPL without DLLs is pretty much the same as GPL because there is actually no way to use the lib without linking statically against your code.
3. We don’t want to give the code for free without having the slightest chance to get something from the community (hence the GPL which I feel gives better chances to get some fixes and improvements from the people who happily use NUI in their software)
4. We don’t want to close the door to commercial uses of NUI, hence the possibility to get a commercial licence to use it, for a fair fee. (We think the fee is fair because it is indexed on the size of the team and the number of products released with it).
5. We’re not against getting some revenue back for all the years of hard work that have gone into making NUI what it is today. We also don’t plan to stop working on it anytime soon. A liberal licence like freebsd, MIT or Mozilla would not work for us either, unless we create two versions of NUI: the lite and opensource version and complete and commercial one with all the features enabled. This really sounds like an support nightmare for a little team like us.

We would be happy to discuss other possibilities in the forum or by email: contact@libnui.net.