Re: Move to LGPL3

[Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>]

Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> Am Sonntag, den 16.03.2008, 07:49 +0100 schrieb Jean Bréfort:
>   
> > Le samedi 15 mars 2008 à 21:43 +0100, Christian Persch a écrit :
> >     
> > > Hi Jean;
> > >
> > > Am Samstag, den 15.03.2008, 21:09 +0100 schrieb Jean Bréfort:
> > >       
> > > > Hmm, and what will happen to applications using at least one GPLv2-only
> > > > libraries?
> > > >         
> > > This might indeed pose a problem, though I'm not sure how major it is. I
> > > have to admit that it is however not a theoretical problem, since we
> > > just found out that we do depend on one such library in Gnome: evince
> > > uses libpoppler which is a fork of Xpdf, and it is GPL version 2 only.
> > >
> > >       
> > Other affected projects are Goffice (GPL-v2 only) and all those which
> > depend on it, namely Gnumeric, Abiword, Gnucash and GChemUtils (the last
> > also use OpenBabel, another GPL-v2 only library). Seems that all the
> > projects I'm involved in would be affected. Some can be relicensed, but
> > probably not all, just because some previous contributors seem to have
> > disappeared from the earth surface.
> >     
>
> I am really wondering what's the reason for FSF claiming, that programs
> licenced GPL-2 only are not allowed to use LGPL-3 libraries. The LGPL-3
> allows non-free, proprietary programs to use LGPL-3 libraries, but
> excludes free software, licensed GPL-2 only? This sounds absurd to me!
>   

It does say something about *GPL*, not about LGPL-3.
You know, "GPL-compatible license" thing. Freedom or
protection damn it.

This Gtk relicensing thing is funny, by the way.
Imagine this in a configure.ac

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GTK, gtk+-2.0 >= 2.6)
PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GTK_LEGAL, gtk+-2.0 < 2.16, [],
[AC_MSG_ERROR([sorry but I won't do it, ask Gtk folks if you
want to know why, I don't know why])])

Yevgen