Comments on: cdparanoia now LGPL v2

By: uraeus

uraeus — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:45:53 +0000

@Mr.Z: As a library our ‘users’ are in the first row application developers, be they companies or private persons. That said the first objection to LGPLv3 raised within the community was not that it restricted the rights of companies to do what they wanted with GStreamer, but the fact that it meant that we without any debate had suddenly made GPL2-only applications no longer compatible with GStreamer. If it hadn’t been for the LGPLv2 being GPL2-only incompatible there is a good chance we wouldn’t have bothered.

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:43:57 +0000

I completely agree with Mr. Z. LGPL v3 and GPL v3 offer additional protection for users. It is absurd to promote the freedom to take away others’ freedom.

By: Mr. Z

Mr. Z — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:51:43 +0000

LGPL v3 and GPL v3 don’t take away users rights. They “give users rights”.

But I see what you are doing here. You’re not talking about “users” you are talking about companies. Companies that want to take away users’ rights in other fields.

How very hypocritical of you!

Using a more “liberal” software license to allow a much more restrictive media licenses. Screw the “real users”.

By: Chris Hubick

Chris Hubick — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:29:13 +0000

I also think the stronger and explicit patent licensing language in LGPLv3 would be of particular benefit to the GStreamer community in it’s negotiation of the IP minefield that is A/V codecs. I like that it guarantees our rights by closing loopholes that companies are using to exploit Free Software.

By: pinky

pinky — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:41:48 +0000

The idea of dual-licensing is to allow people to choose different licenses. LGPL and GPL dual-licensing doesn’t make much sense because of 2 reasons:

(1) LGPL is already GPL compatible so you don’t gain any additional options.
(2) Section 3 of the LGPL2 already allows to apply the terms of the GPL to the LGPL licensed program so all LGPL programs are already “dual-licensed”

To the general topic. I’m a little bit sad that cdparanoia moves back to LGPLv2 instead moving gstreamer to LGPLv3. For me this is a regression.
I still hope that Gtk+3 and GNOME3 will make the move to (L)GPLv3. It would be sad if two of the largest GNU projects (GNOME and Gtk) wouldn’t adopt the licenses.

(L)GPLv3 doesn’t take away rights from the users it secures rights for the users! For example Tivoization takes away users rights and (L)GPLv3 take care that the users will keep their rights to tinker with their software.

It seems ike there is a general missunderstanding a a confusion of cause and effect.

By: Joe Buck

Joe Buck — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:42:28 +0000

Please say “LGPLv2+’ if you mean “LPGL2 or any later version”. LPGL2-only would be a stricter license than this.

Also, dual-licensing between LGPLv2 and GPLv2 makes no sense; the result is simply LGPLv2.