Re: New LGPL and references in copyright files.
On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Santiago Vila wrote:
> Hi *,
>
> To deal with a wishlist bug with which I agree, I'm going to replace the
> LGPL in base-files by the new "Lesser GNU Public License", which is also
> called "LGPL". Since the new LGPL is the successor of the old LGPL, I
> would consider that copyright files saying "you will find the Library GNU
> Public License in /usr/whatever..." do not become "broken" because of this
> change.
>
> The funny thing is that policy says that packages licensed under the
> "LGPL" should refer to the LGPL file in base-files, but does not
> explicitly say what LGPL stands for :-).
>
> I think this may now be ambiguous, but acceptable.
>
> Does somebody feel the need to clarificate this, so that it explicitly
> says whether it refers to the old LGPL, the new one, or both of them?
The GNU LGPL version 2.0 (which you refer to as the old one) was
originally called the Library General Public License due to the fact that
it is used by some libraries (for example, the GNU C Library). A couple of
months ago, it was renamed to the GNU Lesser General Public License in
order to reflect the three facts that (1) it is not exclusively for
libraries, (2) libraries can also use the "standard" General Public
License, and (3) it provides less freedom than ordinary GPL because it
does not guarantee the freedom of programs which link against the code
covered by this license. The license you refer to the new one is the LGPL
version 2.1, a minor revision of the former. Both are correctly called
Lesser General Public License, and the term Library General Public License
is a historical artifact (hence, all references to the latter should be
changed to the former).
--
Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - jkaivo@ndn.net - http://www.ndn.net/
"As time goes on, my signature gets shorter and shorter..." - me
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