Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Xavier Claessens <xclaesse gmail com>]

Le jeudi 27 septembre 2007 �5:48 +0200, Mikael Hallendal a �it :
> 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.

Some examples:
 - Tracker wants EmpathyChatView to display chat logs found by the
indexer.
 - nautilus-sento uses a widget that inherit from GtkCombobox to select
a contact.
 - Megaphone (atm it's part of Empathy tarball but it can change) uses
EmpathyContactListView to show the contact list.
 - Megaphone uses the contact information window from libempathy-gtk

But I agree that many widgets won't be used in third party applications
and I don't know if there is non-GPL application interested by using
empathy widgets.

> Best Regards,
>    Mikael Hallendal

Xavier Claessens.