LGPL is NOT compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions) [LWN.net]

LGPL is NOT compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions)

Posted Nov 20, 2008 8:07 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: LGPL is compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions) by dwheeler
Parent article: MinGW and why Linux users should care

The people who are using libvirt are mostly developing a mix of in-house and proprietary
applications. They don't want to open source their code, nor do we want to discriminate against
them by making them by a special license. They don't need to buy a special license for libvirt on
Linux, nor to use proprietary APIs such as VMWare API / XenAPI.

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LGPL is NOT compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions)

Posted Nov 20, 2008 12:21 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (2 responses)

nor do we want to discriminate against them by making them buy a special license

Since you consider licensing-based incentives to create free software as discrimination, what prevented you from (say) releasing libvirt into the public domain?

LGPL is NOT compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions)

Posted Nov 20, 2008 12:35 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

LGPL protects the libvirt code while not imposing itself on other code that we didn't write.

As a free software developer yourself, you should know the difference between public domain, LGPL
and GPL.

LGPL is NOT compatible with Cygwin's license (GPL+exceptions)

Posted Nov 20, 2008 12:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This is a *management layer*. It's going to get used by people who have existing virtualization systems and want to manage them. Nobody, but nobody is going to say 'hey! my management layer uses GPL, so I should switch virtualization systems to one that is GPL!'. They'll just not use libvirt.

This is a classic example of a library that is better LGPLed than GPLed.