Gnome supports both the free software movement as well as proprietary
developers, and that is why Gnome for years has encouraged the use of
the LGPL license for all of its libraries.
The decision you and I made, in the early days, was to use the LGPL
for the more basic and general libraries, so that proprietary programs
could work with GNOME, but to use the GPL for more advanced libraries
so that they would give an advantage to free applications.
We decided this, not as a way to "support proprietary developers", but
rather to compete with KDE and Qt. Proprietary software developers
could use Qt (by buying a license). If they could not use GNOME's
basic libraries, that would put GNOME at a disadvantage, and the
result could be that KDE with proprietary Qt might triumph.
Now that Qt is free software, beating it in competition is less
crucial. We might not have a reason to use the LGPL for some of
these libraries if we were deciding it now.
So I hope that the GNOME policy about library licensing has not moved
towards more use of the LGPL than in the past.
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