Re: ELPA license, LGPL + additional restrictions
Hi,
On Sat, Nov 03, 2012 at 08:31:57PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> After thinking about this some more, I guess their fear might be that
> people modify and redistribute their ELPA library as part of a bigger
> GPL project. As the LGPL->GPL relicensing seems to be a one-way street,
> they might understandably think that they will not be able to
> incorporate those GPL'd modifications into their version.
As an update to this, I talked one of the ELPA upstream guys and the
above is indeed why they try to remove the GPL relicensing.
However, I also talked to the FSF about this, and they had a different
reasoning. This summarizes their argument:
| The LGPLv3 is a superset of the GPLv3, and as the GPL is part of it
| and allows for additional restrictions to be removed, one can just
| remove all the other additional clauses of the LGPLv3 (excluding the
| already removed clause 2b) and essentially get the GPLv3.
In this sense, using the ELPA code in a GPLv2+ program appears to be
fine.
I still hope the ELPA authors reconsider and relicense their work to
plain LGPLv3.
Cheers,
Michael
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