[Gpe-list] Use of LGPL

[Nils Faerber]

Well, the use of LGPL for libraries was in the early beginning stated on
the GPE homepage - seems it was lost in between, I am sorry for that.

The reason for making the libs LGPL is the same as for many other big
projects, like Gnome or even the GLIBC: So that applications can be
developed with it that might be closed source. Not that we want to
encourage it but it should be possible.

OK, this is not the ideal I know. But we should be realistic here. If we
ever want to see applications like a navigation application for GPE then
we have to provide means for commercial application developers to do so.

I do not see much of a problem here. The code of the library will always
be free and modifications will also have to be placed under LGPL again.

Again, yes I know this is not ideal but realistically we will limit the
use of GPE if we make GPL a policy for everything. For application,
absolutely! But for libraries that might be used by other application I
would be in favour of LGPL.

Do you think you can accept this?

Cheers
  nils


Neal H. Walfield schrieb:
> I share code I write because I want to share it.  I think that
> knowledge should be shared and, as such, I place significant code that
> I write, with some exceptions, under the auspices of the GPL and try
> to contribute to projects which develop GPL licensed code.  I do this
> because, I think that if someone is going to build on my ideas, they
> should also share them.  I do not distinguish between modifying and
> using here: they are both building on and, in both cases, should
> require sharing.
> 
> Some time ago, Florian informed me that the policy for GPE is that all
> libraries should be under the LGPL.  The two libraries which I have
> contributed to are libeventdb and libgpevtype.  Before I started
> working on libeventdb, it was under the GPL [1].  I have since been
> told that this was a mistake.  The code that I contributed to
> libgpevtype, I developed in the context of gpe-calendar.  I added it
> to libgpevtype later.  It accounts for approximately half of the code
> in libgpevtype.
> 
> I have intentions of doing further work on GPE.  I'd like to know what
> the community's view on this issue is.  Is this policy the one the
> community prefers?  Does the community feel that all libraries must be
> licensed under the LGPL and would prefer to refuse the integration of
> enhancements if they were under the GPL?
> 
> Thanks,
> Neal
> 
> 
> 
> [1] http://projects.linuxtogo.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/trunk/base/libeventdb/event-db.c?rev=8298&root=gpe&view=markup
> 
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Viele Grüße
  nils faerber

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