On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 14:16 +0400, Alexander Shaduri wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Having studied the FSF licenses and their restrictions, I think
> it would be reasonable to re-license GTK+ under the LGPLv3
> (or later) + GPLv2 linking exception (or, alternatively, simply
> multi-license it under LGPLv3 / GPLv2).
This idea crossed my mind as well. It has a couple of interesting ups
and downs.
1. Any program that is GPL2-only-plus-exceptions would be
compatible, but the "plus exceptions" clause would effectively
be nullified by the straight-up-GPL2 GTK. Depending on who you
talk to, this may or may not be the case with the LGPL (Havoc,
for example, believes LGPL also has this problem). In any case,
I don't know if anyone is affected by this.
2. You lose a lot of the benefit of the relicense. It would
still leave us open to, for example, "tivoisation" (although,
they'd have to tivoise us under the GPL2 which means that they'd
have to provide source to anything they linked against -- an
interesting twist).
Probably this is the only idea that can really be practically used in
the short term without hurting some projects in our community.
As an interesting twist: this idea could be applied short-term and the
GPL2 option marked as "deprecated" as a lead-up to a future LGPLv3+-only
release (3.0, naturally)...
Cheers
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