Some time ago I blogged about cdparanoia switching from GPLv2 to LGPLv3 on our request. After that time we have been discussing in the GStreamer community about licensing and what is the exact and implicit licensing promise we are and have been making with GStreamer. The conclusion was that since the LGPLv3 is more restrictive than the LGPLv2 we do not want LGPLv3 dependencies in gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-base. As mentioned before we always tried to be very serious and coherent with our licensing in GStreamer and suddenly reducing the rights we offer application and plugin developers is not something we feel should be done without very good reason. This is a policy I hope also other important libraries decide to follow, personally I would think it would be a very sad thing if Glib and Gtk+ for instance started taking away rights from their users without a very well reasoned explanation.
Luckily Monty is a very kind soul, and starting from yesterday there is a new version of cdparanoia III out, 10.1, which is dual-licensed under the LGPLv2 and the GPLv2. So even in the future there will be cdripping support offered in GStreamer gst-plugins-base package.
So go to the cdparanoia download page and get yourself this minty fresh version of cdparanoia. We recommend distributions to update to this version as soon as possible to ensure there are no licensing conflicts in their distribution.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
@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.