Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 27 septembre 2007 à 00:48 +0200, Sven Herzberg a écrit :
>   
>> Next question: consistency with the platform
>>
>> The GNOME platform uses LGPL as the license of choice to provide ISVs
>> with a powerful stack that anyone can use - even to build proprietary
>> software.
>>
>> You say, you took code from gossip - which is GPL.
>>
>> How do you plan to mess with this? Introduce a GPL-only library into the
>> platform? Get the code relicensed?
>>     
>
> The target for Empathy is the desktop, not the platform. I don't think
> this is a problem for the desktop, as it already happened - the
> gtksourceview example comes to mind.
>   

Desktop vs. Platform is just a matter of API/ABI guarantees. Libraries
should still use LGPL, and GtkSourceView was exactly the reason I
brought this up, as they finally were able to resolve this issue for
GNOME 2.20 (and let's learn in the future). One of the main reasons for
GNOME's success was the fact that the most of the development platform
(including desktop and platform libraries) is LGPL or more liberal. We
shouldn't exclude something that the maintainers expect to be used all
over the desktop.

Regards,
  Sven