Licensing issues with dbus and dbus-glib

[Bastien Nocera]

On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 12:18 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> > Rhythmbox is in the process of re-licensing their codebase to GPL
> > +Exception for proprietary gstreamer codec.  Since GPL is incompatible
> > with the AFL they can not use the AFL but since they have the exception
> > clause they can not unilaterally add that exception to the GPL license
> > for dbus-glib and D-Bus.  Any reason why we didn't lgpl the library
> > bits?
> > 
> 
> The basic reason is the patent clause in the AFL. And that the AFL is 
> clearer/less-impossible-to-understand than LGPL, in general.
> 
> While IANAL, perhaps the libdbus situation is not different from LGPL. 
> The LGPL would be GPL-incompatible also, except it says in it "you can 
> choose to GPL instead" - i.e. basically anything under LGPL is 
> dual-licensed under the LGPL rules or GPL. libdbus is saying the same thing.
> 
> The solution for Rhythmbox is pretty simple though: include 
> libdbus-under-AFL in the exception clause. That avoids having to figure 
> out all the weird licensing corner cases and just makes it clearly OK.
> It also avoids tracking down all the dbus contributors to change the 
> dbus licens

So, adding to the expection that libdbus and dbus-glib (as it's what's
used by Totem and Rhythmbox internally) are used under the AFL would be
enough to fix that problem?

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net>