Re: Move to LGPL3

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

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.

The LGPL also says:
  To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.

Which means you can't add more restrictions to the license without
effectively relicensing.

I'm pretty sure it would also be a mess for applications that want to
use proprietary GStreamer plugins.