Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

Le jeudi 27 septembre 2007 �0:48 +0200, Sven Herzberg a �it :
> Xavier Claessens wrote:
> > * Purpose: Empathy [1] consists of a rich set of reusable instant
> > messaging widgets, and a GNOME client using those widgets. It uses
> > Telepathy and Nokia's Mission Control, and reuses Gossip's UI. The main
> > goal is to permit desktop integration by providing libempathy and
> > libempathy-gtk libraries. libempathy-gtk is a set of powerful widgets
> > that can be embeded into any GNOME application.
> >   
> 
> Next question: consistency with the platform
> 
> The GNOME platform uses LGPL as the license of choice to provide ISVs
> with a powerful stack that anyone can use - even to build proprietary
> software.
> 
> You say, you took code from gossip - which is GPL.
> 
> How do you plan to mess with this? Introduce a GPL-only library into the
> platform? Get the code relicensed?
> 
> I really think that this needs to be solved before we even add empathy
> as a blessed dependency.

I don't propose those libs for the platform, only for the desktop atm,
we can even let libempathy(-gtk) as external dep and accept the client
in the desktop.

Right, libempathy and libemapthy-gtk are GPL because it contains code
from Gossip. libempathy mostly contains trivial code from gossip, the
rest is rewritten by me or some collabora workers who are 100% OK to
relicence, so it shouldn't be a problem to relicence libempathy to LGPL.
libempathy-gtk is more a problem since lots of non-trivial code is
written by Gossip developers who doesn't seems to agree to relicence to
LGPL...

I agree the licence will be sooner or later a problem, I see no other
solution than convincing Gossip developers to accept LGPL.

Xavier Claessens.