Re: guile-lib licensing (input requested)

[Julian Graham]

Hurray!  You're my hero, Andy!  Thanks so much for doing this.  As to
the license, I'm fine with Ludovic's suggestion.  (Also, a quick
survey reveals that most Schemes don't even specify the distribution
terms of SSAX, so if you did that, you'd be way ahead.)


Regards,
Julian


On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Andy Wingo <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hey hackers,
>
> In an attack of CADT[0], I have decided to move Guile-lib to
> savannah.nongnu.org, so that Guile contributors can more easily
> contribute to Guile-lib. I've also migrated to Git.
>
> As part of the savannah submission process, Sebastian Gerhardt
> rightfully pointed out some schitzophrenia regarding licensing. Many of
> our sources come from the public domain, but some of our code is GPL.
>
> We should probably have some kind of policy regarding licenses. Here are
> some options that I can think of:
>
>  1) Guile-lib itself has no one license. Individual modules have
>     clearly-stated licenses.
>
>     Advantage: reflects the current situation.
>
>     Disadvantage: difficult for the user to know the licenses of the
>     software they are using. License of the tarball as a whole is
>     ambiguous.
>
>  2) Guile-lib has one license, the GPLv3+.
>
>     Advantage: Clarity, and supportive of software freedom.
>
>     Disadvantage: License is different from that of Guile (LGPLv2+,
>     perhaps becoming v3+). Much more restrictive than some
>     public-domain sources that we base our work on (e.g. ssax).
>
>  3) One license, the LGPLv3+.
>
>     Advantage: Clarity, harmony with Guile's license.
>
>     Disadvantage: Getting some GPL code relicensed to LGPL, although
>     there's not that many contributors for GPL code. A weaker support
>     for software freedom.
>
> What do people think?
>
> Btw: until the guile-lib submission goes through, you can get guile-lib
> from git as follows:
>
>   git clone http://wingolog.org/git/guile-lib.git