LibGTop license will remain LGPL

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Hello guys,

First I'd like to thank all people that helped me to make up my mind
about the best license for LibGTop and for all feedback I got about
this issue.

There are really good reasons for and against each of the two licenses
in question - the GPL or the LGPL, but I finally decided to keep LibGTop
under LGPL and not to change its license to GPL.

The main reason for this is that using the GPL would not also prevent
proprietary writers but also other free software projects from using
LibGTop.

It was always my first aim to make LibGTop to its best use for the
free software community and there are a lot of free software projects
like FreeBSD that are not under the GPL.

Changing the license of LibGTop to the GPL would prevent all those free
software projects from using it and this is definitively agains my wishes.

Of cause this means that I can't prevent proprietary writers from using
LibGTop if I keep its license LGPL, but this risk is low and it won't
do any real harm to the free software community if they use it.

For GNOME I also consider having a good "Free"-BSD port (free in the
sense of non-commercial) of LibGTop an important issue as users on this
system should not be discriminated against Linux users. My idea with
LibGtop was to have a portable way of getting system statistics and to
allow people on all other Unixes to use GTop and their favorite panel
applets as any Linux user.

Since the "Free"-BSD ports makes heavy use of internal kernel structures
getting more help and feedback from the FreeBSD project and the FreeBSD
people will make maintaining the FreeBSD port of LibGTop much easier and
will give us a much better port. A change to the GPL would make this
nearly impossible since it is unlikely that people contribute to a work
that they can't use.

My decision for the LGPL does not, however, mean that I agree with the
idea of using free libraries in proprietary programs - it is ok as long
as the proprietary writers also contribute to the free software community
but it is not ok if they just use it because of its "week" license
(they'll call it "week" in this case).

This means that I may change the license of LibGTop to a new version of
the GPL at some time in the future if the FSF decides to make such a
new version of the GPL that does not prevent other free software
projects from using libraries that are distributed under this license.

In the spirit of Free Software,
-- 
Martin Baulig - martin@home-of-linux.org - http://www.home-of-linux.org