Re: roadmap for 3.0.0

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos]

On 06/08/2011 10:46 PM, Brad Hards wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jun 2011 09:36:10 PM Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
>> The license of gnutls 3.0.0 would be GNU LGPL version 3.
> Can you explain the rationale for this?
> 
> My concern is that there is some software that is stuck on GPL v2 
> (only), and LGPLv2 is compatible with that, but LGPLv3 is not. 
> Poppler is a library that comes to mind, where it is often linked to 
> (L)GPLv2+ code in tools like Evince and Okular (amongst others), and 
> everything reverts back to GPLv2. Would a LGPLv3 / GPLv2 license be 
> acceptable here?

We thought about that, but it wouldn't be adequate. That is because gmp
that now gnutls is linked to, is LGPLv3. Even if we allow dual
license gmp doesn't. Note however that the problem is not in LGPLv3
which allows linking with everything, even proprietary programs. It is
GPLv2-only that causes the issue. It can be easily solved by the
authors of GPLv2-only programs by allowing linking with an
LGPLv3 library (see [0]).

regards,
Nikos

[0]. http://price.sourceforge.net/exception.html