Re: (L)GPLv3

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Le lundi 05 juillet 2010, à 10:48 -0400, Ryan Lortie a écrit :
> hi Everyone,
> 
> I recently received an email from a company in our ecosystem asking me
> to relicense a smallish piece of code from GPLv3 to (L)GPLv2.
> 
> I'm not really interested in inciting a flamewar on the topic or
> anything, but I'm wondering how people feel, in general about the
> licensing direction of the GNOME project.
> 
> 
>   1) Go freedom-warrior GPLv3 style and make the world a better place
>      (potentially at the cost of our own relevance).
> 
> 
>   2) Be pragmatic GPLv2 style and make the world a better place
>      (potentially at the cost of reduced end-user freedoms).
> 
> 
> One thing in particular I want to mention is that I asked about this
> topic a couple of years ago in relation to Gtk and was told at that time
> that we can't reasonably relicense Gtk 2.0 since the licence could
> almost be considered as being part of the API/ABI contract.
> 
> We have 3.0 upon us now, so I guess we should make a choice one way or
> another.

The current (unwritten, afaik) policy is (L)GPLv2+.

It's worth thinking really hard before moving to LGPLv3 (at least; not
sure about GPLv3): LGPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2, according to the
FSF; that's a major issue, and, IMHO, this doesn't go well with our
philosophy of having our platform LGPL.

(see http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq for the compatibility matrix)

Vincent

-- 
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