On Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:44:14 -0400, Raffael Cavallaro wrote: > On 2010-03-25 06:06:09 -0400, Andrew Haley said: > >> There's nothing ironic about it. The FSF seeks to maximize freedom, so >> licenses code whichever way works best. Libraries sometimes have >> different needs from applications. > > Which is why I suggest that Pascal's lisp libraries would be more useful > licensed under the LLGPL than the GPL. It's ironic because the FSF is > the creator of the GPL, and even they recognized that the GPL was a poor > fit for libraries which is why they created the Library (now Lesser) > GPL.
I disagree -- I don't think that the FSF considers the GPL a "poor fit" for libraries. Quite the opposite (see [1]). They just recognized that in certain situations, some people would prefer something like the LGPL, and I guess that they wanted to give them the choice. But the GPL is still the option they recommend, even for libraries. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html Regarding the broader issue (of how people license their libraries): I think this is an optimization problem where people have heterogeneous objective functions, and thus trying to convince people to pick another license is not always a worthwhile. It is possible that someone using a GPL/LGPL/LLGPL/BSD/MIT/... license is perfectly aware of the advantages and disadvantages, it is just that they decided to make a different choice. In which case, threads like these are unlikely to be fruitful. Regards, Tamas _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
