[gnutls-dev] (L)GPL v3

[Simon Josefsson]

Andreas Metzler <ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org> writes:

> On 2007-06-26 Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> wrote:
> [...]
>> * Update license to (L)GPLv3.
> [...]
>
> Hello,
>
> I have eyed the gnutls-extra dependency chain's copyright statements.
> Most of them seem to use the "either version 2 of the License, or (at
> your option) any later version." language.
>
> However (mini)lzo 2.02 is version 2 only:
>
>   The LZO library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
>   modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License,
>   version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation.
>
> 2.01 (which is the minilzo version in gnutls's tarball) used the
> or-later-clause and can therefore be linked into a
> GPLv3-or-later-licensed gnutls-extra. However upgrading to minilzo
> 2.02 or linking against the separate lzo2 library as distributed by
> Linux distributions would be impossible currently. Afaik GPLv2-only
> code and GPLv3-or-later code may not be linked together.
>
> I am yet not sure what the implications of going from LGPLv2 to LGPLv3
> for libgnutls itself are; I only found a compatibility-matrix for v3
> draft on the FSF site on http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq
>
> I do not know if this matrix still is correct for the final LGPLv3 but
> it says that GPLv2-only applies cannot use LGPLv3 libs. I am not sure
> on how big a problem this is going to cause, on a quick check on my
> installed gnutls using packages only cups, lynx and KDE do without the
> or-later-clause.

Hi!  Thanks for the review.  I have asked on the gnu-prog-discuss list
what we should do here.  It may take some time to solve this, and I
don't want to hold up the next stable release for it.  So it is no
longer a release blocker.

Now I should really go work on the external signing callback instead,
which actually is the major release blocker right now...

/Simon