Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.24

["Daniel Svensson" <dsvensson gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Simon Josefsson <simon josefsson org> wrote:
>  Some reasons to not use the LGPL for libraries are already well known,
>  see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html>.

Companies don't like GPL as they have to expose their IP and are
afraid to loose money. If the library is LGPL they can still use the
code but at the same time protect their IP. This is a good thing. The
more companies willing to integrate open source software into their
products the more aware they will become, and the more likely at least
some of them contribute code back to the community.

And as for empathy as this thread seems to be about. Nobody has talked
about how much time would be required to throw out the GPL-infected
code and replace it with LGPL, together with the time it would take to
get permissions from the people who are not strict GPL-fanatics to
relicense to LGPLv3? I mean, the methods are there, rip out the
bodies, and if there are proper unittests it would "just" be a matter
of hacking until they all pass again without looking at the original
code right? Considering how fast the Moonlight prototype was hacked by
the mono team based on specs, and this would be a much smaller task,
it doesn't seem unreasonable to just go ahead and do it instead of
wasting time on a ml?

Just an idea, I actually have no idea of how many hours would be
required. Perhaps someone with more insight could contribute a
guesstimate?

-- 
Daniel Svensson