With all this discussion about licensing, why does Lumariver not respect the licenses of software it uses? A cursory examination shows the code contains LibTIFF, ExPat, and LittleCMS libraries yet none of the required license information is present. Depending on what other codebases are linked in, there are also signs that GPL code could be present as well.
Actually we do, or "I" in this case as this has been a one-man project (except for my colleague that helped me getting started with QT).
I've worked with many open and closed source licenses for more than 15 years, both commercially and non-commercially, both using and making. I've shared a lot of my work for free, been involved for a long time and is still involved in the open-source community. This is both my passion and profession. I respect software developers and I'm not in any case trying to misuse third-party libs. If there's some mistake I'll correct it, but I go through the licenses of the third party components to make sure I can use them commercially. Here's that license section:
http://www.lumariver.com/lrpd-manual/#acknowledgements maybe I should cite licenses of the standard libs like ExPat tiff lcms but it's often not required. Not all libs require that license information is repeated in the docs, but I shall check it again. Some don't want to be cited in the docs other want it, it varies even with similar licenses so it's quite easy to make a mistake. The only GPL (a copyleft license that cannot be used in closed source software) code in there is from DCamProf which I am the copyright owner and have licensed to Xarepo which owns the Lumariver code.
Citing licenses in the docs should of course be done if required, but what's the really important thing is to make sure commercial use is ok at all, and that is what I check first before even using a library, while I may have been a bit sloppy in the citing roundup -- I did go through them but "legalese" (license language) can be a bit tricky to decode (and therefore there are many misconceptions on what's required and not). I hope I haven't missed anything, and I'm better at reading licenses than most software developers and laymen are, but now when you complain about it I became a bit uncertain...
Anyway taking LittleCMS as you mention as an example, it uses the MIT license
https://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php,
"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."
So what does it mean that the copyright notice should be included in the Software? It means that if you integrate the code into your software (rather than use a pre-packaged lib like I do) the source code files must include that statement, so it doesn't suddenly change copyright or license so the company using the code suddenly think they wrote it themselves. It's for the software development. It doesn't mean that the license needs to be cited in the user docs or the lib must be mentioned. LittleCMS is used by pretty much every cross-platform software that has active color management by the way.
Funny you would mention expat (an XML parsing lib, also uses MIT license like lcms), and the MacOS version of LRPD actually uses the lib distributed with MacOS itself so it's not in the application package. The lib is there because Adobe's DNG SDK links to it, LRPD itself doesn't actually use it directly. Again it doesn't require citing in the docs. If it would tons and tons of software would need to mention it as this lib is very commonly used.
Looking at the libtiff BSD license it uses an unclear wording regarding citing (most BSD licenses use a clearer wording), so there maybe I should actually cite the license in the user documentation, most seem not to though. But you know what -- now when the software is finished and distributed I shall go through all the libs once again and mention them in that section and if uncertain like in the libtiff case I'll provide the license, it's better to mention one too many times than one too few, as there's always someone that assume I don't care about which libs I use and how I use them, but I can assure you I do care.
That said I do know it's quite common that some developers that don't really know much about open-source and licensing just use it as they please without giving it any thought on what's allowed, so I understand your suspicion especially if you don't know who I am and my history in software development. As an author and contributor to many open-source projects I'm very much aware of that situation.
Note that cross-platform commercial software like LRPD often use lots of open-source libs, as the cross-platform stuff usually is from the unix world which has a long tradition of permissive open-source licenses. Being license advisor to my former employee I know this scares business people, and there's been quite some FUD thrown around making the case that it's not safe to make commercial software other than using say Microsoft .NET or MacOS XCode as the alternatives would be riddled with dangerous licenses that force your code to be open-source (GPL is the big bad monster to those...). However this is not the case, you do need to check the licenses, and indeed GPL does put that type of limits, but nearly all common libraries has a permissive license and nearly always you just need to use a pre-packaged lib and don't need to modify the lib itself which makes it even less complicated. And the citing requirement thing is rarer than most seem to believe.
If you have more questions about licensing and libs we use in LRPD you can send me a private message. I'm myself quite interested in the subject, but I guess most readers are more interested in what LRPD actually does
