Comment on docs/lesser.txt

Bernhard Fischer rep.nop at aon.at
Fri Apr 14 08:38:57 UTC 2006


On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 09:49:40PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
>If this was docs/lgpl.txt I'd update 
>archival/libunarchive/decompress_bunzip2.c to point to it, but it isn't.
>
>Instead, this is the "oh no, don't use this license!" version.  As far as I 
>can tell, the only difference between LGPL 2.0 and 2.1 was renaming it 
>"lesser" and prepending a big religious text about how you should never 
>license anything under this license because the full GPL is so much more 
>matching of the RMS vision, all hail Stallman.  (Because obviously, we can't 
>be expected to make up our own minds about this sort of thing.)
>
>Is there any actual difference in the legal parts between 2.0 or 2.1, or is it 
>just the propoganda bits?  If not, I'd much rather stick with 2.0...

It's you who's the legalese hobbyist, i don't care much :)
I'd just put all stuff under Dual GPL / MIT/X in a project which
didn't choose to only allow GPL, but it's fine to aim for (and be!) GPL.

So let's leave removing lesser.txt and adding lgpl.txt to the
maintainer.. ;)

>
>Also, having bits of libbb under the LGPL is probably a bad thing.  That 

Ok, i misunderstood this as i thought that LGPL was ok for the lib parts.

>library is not LGPL.  It is, in its entirety, GPL.  We are not intending it 

Mjn3 told me that he's fine with putting all his busybox stuff under
"LGPL or even GPL", so just go ahead and make this explicit in your
files, please.

The patches from Denis Vlasenko i checked in earlier this week can also
be put under either LGPL or GPL
(http://www.busybox.net/lists/busybox/2006-April/020364.html)
So i can convert these too.

One question about the new networking xfuncs, though:
It was not well received that these live in libbb since only
networking related applets use them, but they are built even if no
applet needs them. I agree that it would be better to have them in
libnetworking.a, but we currently don't have this.
We only have libiproute.a which is basically the helpers for the ip()
(route, addr, etc) related applets.
I ment to put the networking xfuncs into a combined (and possibly
cleaned up) libnetworking.a later on, but this implies that the network
stuff is a little bit restructured. How should we proceed on this?




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