Re: Move to LGPL3

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 21:48 +0100, Tim Janik wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Mar 2008, Andrew Cowie wrote:
> 
> > This topic was discussed recently on foundation-list.
> >
> > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2008-March/msg00032.html
> >
> > In summary, attempting to relicence the library would be, in practise,
> > impossible.
> >
> > No further benefit is gained by discussing this topic further.
> 
> Updating the glib & gtk+ headers to LGPLv3 is not relicensing.
> 
> Our headers currently state:
>   * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
>   * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
>   * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
>   * version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
> 
> So, everone is allowed to "redistribute [...] under the terms of the
> GNU Lesser General Public License [...] version 2 [...] or [...] later",
> which LGPLv3 fullfills.
> 
> Accepting LGPLv3 submissions in the future means that the library
> as a whole would effectively become LGPL >= 3 licensed.
> So then, we might as well adapt our headers to reflect this.

My take on it is that it's breaking our interface.  I'd fine if we tell
the world that we are going to do the switch in three years from now and
stick to it, but changing tomorrow is like changing stable API tomorrow.
Just deprecate the old license now, remove it in 3, 5, whatever years...

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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