Re: Module proposal: Empathy for GNOME 2.22

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

27 sep 2007 kl. 15.32 skrev Luis Villa:

Hi,

> On 9/27/07, Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 10:03 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > > I wouldn't re-license it
> >
> > [there is tons of both context and history here, which the rest of  
> > this
> > thread covers. On the topic of licencing, however:]
> >
> > I must admit that as an advocate of software freedom and as  
> > someone who
> > works for a firm that releases its work under the GPL, I am not  
> > adverse
> > to the idea of a GNOME library being licenced under the GPL only.
> >
> > I realize full well that there is a certain fraction of the wider
> > universe of people who use the GNOME platform who are using it  
> > under the
> > pragmatic terms of the LGPL to write their proprietary software.  
> > Some of
> > those companies contribute to our community their IP and their
> > employees' time, and that's fantastic.
> >
> > I hugely respect, however, the expression that has been made by  
> > people
> > who wrote software under the GPL that they wish it to remain so
> > licenced. That's their call, and it is effectively final.
>
> It is of course their call. And likewise it is the GNOME community's
> call not to accept libraries licensed as such.
>
> We have a very longstanding and very deliberate policy to license our
> libraries LGPL, and it has served us well. This is not the time to
> change it, *especially* since we want these libraries to be deeply
> embedded into all of GNOME, not just some applications.

I'm a bit unsure about how useful libempathy-gtk would be for third  
party applications? Do we have any use cases for this as a library.  
From the way I suggested at the time of the fork was to make Empathy  
run on top of Telepathy and create the required applications for  
integrating with mission control etc. This doesn't require an  
external library though.

For example I can't see the chat dialog widgets to be all that useful  
to other applications as they should preferably message Empathy to  
show a chat dialog for a specific user. The same with most of the  
other widgets, roster widget and possibly vcard/info dialogs excluded.

Best Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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