[augeas-devel] Relicensing under the LGPLv3

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:11:19AM -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 10:08 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > 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+.

File bugs ! It was supposed to have been cleaned up by maintainers ;-)

> This whole licensing business is an insane mess ...

Yeah, that's why I suggest to play it safe and stay LGPLv2+ in the short
to medium term, to maximise compatability with apps wanting to use
augeas.

Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|