The Keystone Application Framework exists to provide a high quality architectural base on which to build software applications, available freely to anyone.
It seeks to implement credible industry application standards in a fashion which promotes reuse by software developers in applications, and chooses only standards which are freely implementable, royalty and patent free
The Keystone Application Framework is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. The terms of this license may been read here
The GNU Lesser General Public License is termed towards the licensing of software libraries. Application Frameworks may be considered as software libraries, but the nature of their use requires a slightly different licensing definition than that which is provided by the LGPL.
This sections modifies the terms of the LGPL to fit these needs. It is the intention of this license to fulfill the requirements of an Open Source Definition license.
The LGPL makes a distinction between a "work based on the library" and a "work that uses the library" for the purposes of defining it's licensing terms. Section 5 of the LGPL defines a "work that uses the library" as such
5. A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the Library, but is designed to work with the Library by being compiled or linked with it, is called a "work that uses the Library". Such a work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and therefore falls outside the scope of this License.
However, it is the nature of Application Frameworks that applications reuse and extend classes defined in the base framework. Any Application Framework application is therefore by the LGPL definition a "work based on the library". This would require that the source to any such application fall under the distribution terms of the LGPL. This is not the intent of this license
For the purposes of the Keystone Application Framework license, these LGPL terms are redefined as follows:
a "work based on the library" is a derivative of the Application Framework which is itself an Application Framework. Such a work falls under the same distribution terms as the original framework
a "work which uses the library" is a work which links with the framework, but is not itself an Application Framework. Such a work may be:
The LGPL requires that binary distributions of software built using the licensed library in any way are provided with complete object code, or that it is made easily available. Many software producers may find this requirement unworkable. The license for the Keystone Application Framework therefor modifies this requirement as follows:
The resulting binary images of a "work which uses the library" (A library, component or application) may be distributed under the software producers own terms, without any of the additional requirements listed in clause 6 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.