My open tickets in bugzilla.fedora.us

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 12:24:15 +0100, Gianluca Sforna wrote:

> On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 08:41:56 -1000, Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> > >
> > > This would still not solve the issue with linking it with GPL libs
> > > like Coin2 and SoQt. I will ask if they can also help us on this
> > > topic.
> > >
> > 
> > Yikes, is this even a fixable situation?  AFAIK GPL and LGPL cannot link no?
> > 
> > Warren
> > 
> 
> Of course IANAL, but my understanding is you can not link a LGPL app
> to a GPL library (anything linked to GPL has to be GPL).
> On the contrary, you can link a GPL app to a LGPL lib since the latter
> gives you the right to link from an app under any license.

The important bit is the end-product and under which terms it is
licenced. The LGPL gives the ability to publish software with "less free"
licence terms than GPL. Hence the original name was changed to LESSER GPL
(the LGPL permits use of LGPL'ed pieces in proprietary software).

You can link GPL and LGPL libraries when creating applications. You can
mix GPL and LGPL components in your own software just fine as long as you
choose the GPL for your end-product. The LGPL is upwards compatible with
the GPL. The end-product can also be a library. But if you wanted to
choose the LGPL for it, neither you nor anybody else could apply its terms
and create a proprietary app with it, because the GPL'ed pieces it is
based on would require the end-product to be GPL, too.

OpenMOIV library, on the contrary, is not your own software. If you built
it in a way that made it GPL only, this is not what the authors intended
(releasing packages like that would impose more strict free software
licence terms on the library users).

> So it seems that, in order to allow us to make another OpenMOIV
> package linked to Coin, they would need to release the next version as
> GPL (or at least with dual licensing).

Dual licencing is no solution for a library, since LGPL is not an option
when the library was built with GPL'ed parts.