[augeas-devel] Relicensing under the LGPLv3

[David Lutterkort]

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 10:08 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 02:59:48PM -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
> > I am thinking about relicensing Augeas under the LGPLv3, one of the
> > reasons being that I want to use at least one gnulib module
> > (canonicalize_file_name) that is only available under the LGPLv3.
> 
> What does that do ?  Can you use realpath() instead ?

It's the non-broken version of realpath. See the BUGS section of
realpath(3)

> > As far as I understand the matter, there should be little impact on the
> > users of Augeas, in particular what can be linked against libaugeas, but
> > IANAL, and I'd like to hear from others before I take that step.
> 
> Well the obvious impact is prevention of its use in GPLv2 only programs,
> and any (L)GPLv2+ programs which use it, result in a LGPLv3+ combined
> work. Personally I take a conservative view & prefer to keep things 
> (L)GPLv2+ licensed. Though clearly in a year or two there'll be a tipping
> point where too many useful libs are v3+ and it thus ceases to be pratical
> to care about v2 compatability. We're not there yet though

Yeah, that's the biggest concern; the main issue though is that reliable
licensing information is almost impossible to come by in bulk.

> The question is how many of these would be interested in Augeus ? The
> most likely candidates are KDE, Java, HAL and Ruby since they're general
> purpose libs/apps sitting as a foundation for many other apps

The RPM licensing information is seriously unreliable; just
spot-checking two off your list, the Ruby license is compatible to the
GPL (both versions) and enscript is actually GPLv2+.

This whole licensing business is an insane mess ...

David