Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On 9/27/07, Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com> wrote:
> 27 sep 2007 kl. 15.32 skrev Luis Villa:
>
> Hi,
>
> > On 9/27/07, Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com> wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 10:03 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> >>> I wouldn't re-license it
> >>
> >> [there is tons of both context and history here, which the rest of
> >> this
> >> thread covers. On the topic of licencing, however:]
> >>
> >> I must admit that as an advocate of software freedom and as
> >> someone who
> >> works for a firm that releases its work under the GPL, I am not
> >> adverse
> >> to the idea of a GNOME library being licenced under the GPL only.
> >>
> >> I realize full well that there is a certain fraction of the wider
> >> universe of people who use the GNOME platform who are using it
> >> under the
> >> pragmatic terms of the LGPL to write their proprietary software.
> >> Some of
> >> those companies contribute to our community their IP and their
> >> employees' time, and that's fantastic.
> >>
> >> I hugely respect, however, the expression that has been made by
> >> people
> >> who wrote software under the GPL that they wish it to remain so
> >> licenced. That's their call, and it is effectively final.
> >
> > It is of course their call. And likewise it is the GNOME community's
> > call not to accept libraries licensed as such.
> >
> > We have a very longstanding and very deliberate policy to license our
> > libraries LGPL, and it has served us well. This is not the time to
> > change it, *especially* since we want these libraries to be deeply
> > embedded into all of GNOME, not just some applications.
>
> I'm a bit unsure about how useful libempathy-gtk would be for third
> party applications? Do we have any use cases for this as a library.
>  From the way I suggested at the time of the fork was to make Empathy
> run on top of Telepathy and create the required applications for
> integrating with mission control etc. This doesn't require an
> external library though.
>
> For example I can't see the chat dialog widgets to be all that useful
> to other applications as they should preferably message Empathy to
> show a chat dialog for a specific user. The same with most of the
> other widgets, roster widget and possibly vcard/info dialogs excluded.

It is entirely possible that this libempathy is one of those
extraneous libraries that is at the wrong level to make LGPL relevant-
I'm even less of an expert on this stuff than I was when I was active
:)

My point was that the choice to include a GPL library should be made
based on the project's policy, not based on the preferences of the
authors of the library.

In other words, the decision tree should go something like (obviously
simplified and cutting out all the personal/technical/political
choices/negotiations):

1) project decides if it wants the library; if the project wants the
library then...
2) project decides if the library needs to be LGPL; if the project
thinks the library should be LGPL then...
3) library copyright holders decide whether or not to relicense. If
they won't want to relicense, the library doesn't go in.

Andrew seemed to be suggesting skipping step 2, and I wanted to kill
that idea quickly- the project's long-standing strategy and
preferences are extremely important and can't just be casually
ignored.

Luis