[packagekit] Compilation error

[Ken VanDine]

I think libpackagekit needs to be something like LGPL.  Does that mean
we would need to break that out into a separate source tree?  Might be
good anyway...

--Ken

On 10/11/07, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 12:35 +0200, Tom Parker wrote:
> > Somewhat. I'm not fond of dual-licensing, because of the inherent
> > problem that a later user will decide that they only want to license
> > under one of the licenses and any changes they make can't then be
> > easily folded back into the earlier dual-licensed upstream code. I
> > like the GPL because it effectively says "you get all this stuff for
> > free, but if you fix stuff we want the changes back", and as I see it
> > dual-licensing can potentially get in the way of that.
> >
> > I'm presuming there's probably various other people on here with
> > strong opinions on this, and although there's part of me that wants to
> > avoid licensing discussions, I figure we need to decide on a licensing
> > policy for PackageKit in general. As I see it, the GPLv2+ licensing
> > boilerplate tends to be a kinda default choice (assuming the original
> > coder likes the GPL licenses), and we need to talk about whether
> > that's what we want.
>
> Right. To be clear from the start, I'm a programmer who wants to write
> code and don't think licencing should get in the way. I'm also not a
> lawyer or have any sort of legal training, so bear that in mind when you
> read this email.
>
> We need to choose one licence and stick to it. I chose GPLv2+ as it's
> what I used in gnome-power-manager and am most familiar with, I also
> think it lets us do more with the code. I don't want to even think about
> BSD, only GPL is good for me.
>
> If we want to go GPLv2, I think we have to get all contributors to
> relicence (not that much of a pain at this early stage) and change ALL
> source files to this new licence. If we want to go GPLv2+ then Tom has
> to change the backend (at his choice) to the same thing as the other
> code. I'll repeat, the whole project tree has to have one licence.
>
> So we have two choices:
>
> 1. Tom could relicence the apt backend as GPLv2+ and we stick with
> GPLv2+ as a project.
> 2. We could get all contributors to relicence to GPLv2 (only) and change
> all the source files.
>
> Now, I don't pretend to know the nuances of the different clauses, but
> I'm guessing GPLv2+ allows people to distribute under a GPLv3 licence
> and allow linking to from a GPLv3 only program. We also have to be clear
> as libpackagekit has to be able to be linked with GPL2/GPL3/MIT code
> without any licence violation. We could use LGPLvX(+) for the library
> for this case, although I'm not sure we want proprietary software
> installing stuff automatically using PackageKit.
>
> This is very much a release blocker for 0.1.0.
>
> Richard.
>
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-- 
Ken VanDine
http://ken.vandine.org