Re: GLib plans for the next cycle

[Tim-Philipp Müller <t i m zen co uk>]

On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 20:34 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> > - What of the license issues?
> >  GLib is LGPL.  libdbus-1 is not.  (...)
> 
> Just for the record, my comment on this has always been that the
> license issues were not earth-shattering to begin with, and the
> relicensing was just throwing a bone to people who cared. (...)
> 
>  (snip commentary and what-ifs)
>
> There are many things to worry about in life, but this is not one of them.

I hear what you're saying, and I don't really have a strong opinion or
much detailed knowledge on the licensing subject myself, but I can't
help but feel that there's still something wrong about all this.

You tell people not to worry. But many people clearly do seem to worry.

It seems to me that by making GLib, the cornerstone of our platform,
depend on libdbus, we'd be creating a fair bit of uncertainty, and I
can't see that as being good for the platform.

At best this means inconvenience and hassle for people already building
on our platform while they evaluate the new situation for themselves. At
worst it deters people from considering or adopting it.

I don't think this is something we'd even be considering if there was a
good alternative.

Just to be clear, I'm very much in favour of adding DBus support to
GLib, I'm just a bit reluctant about shrugging off the dbus license
aspect like that.

Cheers
 -Tim