Pango License



Is there any hope of Pango every becoming dual licensed?

I just found out today, that because Pango is exclusively LGPL, we're dead in the water using it for some of our customers. At least on platforms such as OSX and Windows. To name one of huge irony, IBM. Which is basically my way of saying, it doesn't matter how much write or wrong there is in the argument, it's IBM, and we're just not going to win that argument.

I'll continue to support a binding to the library for VisualWorks Smalltalk, but we can never hope to have it as any more than an "add on" for customers who choose to use it.

I've cross posted this to the Cairo list, because it brings up an interesting point (IMO). The project page for Pango says 

"The integration of Pango with Cairo (http://cairographics.org/) provides a complete solution with high quality text handling and graphics rendering."

And that's always the general stance on the lists. You can do a little bit of demo stuff with just the Cairo APIs, but if you're serious about text, you use Pango. Period.

But Cairo is dual licensed under the MPL, which actually opens a lot of doors with a lot of lawyers I've found. But Pango is not, so while the technical statement of the above quote is correct, the legal one is not.

Sorry for sounding off with my frustration/disappointment.

--
Travis Griggs
"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." -Archibald MacLeish, poet and librarian





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