[Bug-gnulib] Re: licenses again

[Simon Josefsson]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

>     I have created a project "Lesser GNULib" that will hold LGPL
>     rewrites
>
> Something seems fundamentally wrong here.  A primary purpose of GNU in
> general, not to mention Gnulib in particular, is to avoid having to
> rewrite code.  Yet here you are, being forced to do exactly that --
> rewrite code that is already freely available, in order to use it in a
> GNU project.  What a shame.
>
> There must be a better solution.
>
> Ok, so if rms doesn't want to just blanket say that everything in gnulib
> is available under lgpl, how about asking him about lgpl-ing the
> specific files that you need, pointing out that otherwise you need to
> rewrite them for your LGPL project, and isn't this rather a waste of
> always-scarce development time?

Yes, I explained this in my e-mail.  OTOH, rewriting all of the
modules I have needed so far took less time than discussing it...

> Although it does nothing about the underlying problem, administratively
> we could at least have the lgpl'd files in gnulib, if you like.  Some
> variation of srclist-update could keep the lgpl and gpl copies in sync.

I'll forward all modules I think would be useful in gnulib, of course.
I'm not sure how to handle some rewrites, like getline/getdelim, which
is also thread safe.  I wonder if the gpl/lgpl separation mentioned in
gnulib/README isn't a good idea after all, then you can use the same
file name twice.

Thanks,
Simon