dolfin team mailing list archive

["Johan Jansson" <jjan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 05:44:53PM +0200, Anders Logg wrote:
> One thing to discuss is which version of LGPL to use. There are
> several options:
>
>   1. Version 2.1
>   2. Version 2.1 or (at your option) any later version published by FSF
>   3. Version 3 (soon to be published)
>
> Before making the switch from GPL --> LGPL, it would be good to decide
> on 1, 2 or 3 so we don't need to make another license change soon.
>
> /Anders

The email we sent out to the authors only concerned version 2.1 though,
i.e. we sent a link to:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html

If we would have wanted to ask about allowing any future licenses, we
should have indicated that in the email, but we didn't do that. So if we
want to ask permission for that, we need to send out another mail.

My intent is not at all to rush this (after all, we have waited several
months). But perhaps we can be satisfied for now that we have managed to
carry out at least this change? I think it would be much more
controversial to ask people to agree to distribute under a license which
doesn't exist yet (Version 3 and future licenses), so I think the best
plan would have been to do it step-by-step anyway.

We can have a discussion about this now though if people are interested,
since it's become relevant. Would it make sense to have an open-ended
license, i.e.:

# Copyright (C) 2007 Foo Bar
# Licensed under either the GNU LGPL Version 2.1
# or (at your option) any later version published
# by the Free Software Foundation.

As I said, I'm highly skeptical of what would constitute giving the Free
Software Foundation a legal carte blanche with my license. Sure, they seem
like reasonable people now, but who knows what they will decide in 10
years time? So I would probably say no to that. Or does this sound
reasonable to you?

  Johan