Re: proposed FAQ entries about licensing

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Apr-2009, Judd Storrs wrote:

| On its own, the FSF consideres the GPLv2 license to be incompatible
| with the GPLv3. GPL license compatibility is a mess. See
| 
| http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility
| 
| Only if the software is licensed as GPLv2 or "any later version" can
| it be promoted to v3 and included with GPLv3 software.
| 
| There are a number of projects that are specifically "GPLv2 only" and
| therefore incompatible with GPLv3. Such as the linux kernel and FLTK.

Are you sure about FLTK?  It appears to me that it is LGPLv2 or any
later version plus some exceptions.  At least that is what the file
/usr/share/doc/libfltk1.1-dev/copyright on my Debian system tells me,
and that also appears to be consistent with the files in
/usr/include/FL on my system that have copyright notices.  But even if
it were strictly LGPLv2 only, then I think the chart you reference
above says that we can still link with it.  We just can't incorporate
parts of it in Octave (i.e., cut and paste code directly from the FLTK
sources into the Octave sources) unless we can relicense it using
GPLv3.

jwe