Re: [GtkGLExt] API changes for the next major gtkglext release (glext)

[Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 freenet de>]

On 01/11/2010 01:32 PM, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 01:36:47AM -0500, Arc Riley wrote:
> > There is no license issue.  GLEW is under the BSD, at worse you include the
> > BSD boilerplate in the header and copy/modify their headers.  It's fully
> > compatible with both v2 and v3 of the LGPL.
>
> We cannot combine code that has a similar license to the BSD license
> (non-copyleft), with LGPL licensed (copyleft) code.

Most BSD licenses are compatible with the [L]GPL, i.e. such kind of code 
could be relicensed using the [L]GPL as an "umbrella license".

Whether we could do so would require careful examination of these BSD 
licensed pieces of code, because some BSD licenses are considered 
non-free (Cf. 
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses).

> You can link in between these, such as a program linking to a library,
> but not form a single binary object from it, such as a .so containing
> both LGPL and BSD licensed code.

Pardon, but you are in error. There are many precedences of "adopting 
BSD-licensed code under a [L]GPL umbrella - Most prominent example would 
be glibc.

> > More importantly, GLEW and gtkglext overlap in more ways than glext.h.
> > There's enough dependency bloat in the Gnome community, not to mention
> > redundant functionality taking up valuable memory and causing cache misses
> > that hurt performance.  GLEW is barely enough to constitute a full library
> > in any event.  That's one less dependency to worry about.
>
> gtkglext is a simple way to get an OpenGL context for a GTK+ widget. It
> is not an OpenGL convenience library.  It is not intended to:
>
>   o Provide a scenegraph
>   o Do input handling, window management, etc.
>   o Draw geometric shapes
>   o Provide convenience wrappers for GL/GLX/etc.

Agreed. I am also not excited about this proposal.

Ralf