Re: Pango License

[august <august alien mur at>]

> 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.


I hope this isn't too off-topic for the list, but I am curious.  What is
the legal hang-up you have with LGPL?   Maybe I don't understand the
details fine enough, but aren't you able to make a commercial or
closed-source product with an LGPL library?  Of course, you'd have to
release any modifications you make to the pango lib itself, but you'd
still be able to distribute your "product".  Is that the problem?   Or,
have I understood something wrong?


best -august.