Re: Request to relax the licenses of quotearg, quotearg-simple, xalloc, xalloc-die, xalloc-oversized to LGPLv2+

[Paolo Bonzini]

Il 17/10/2012 17:46, Eric Blake ha scritto:
> On 10/17/2012 09:35 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>> libguestfs (an LGPLv2+ library) would like to use the useful quotearg
>> functions to ensure we can run system(3)-style external commands while
>> safely quoting shell arguments.
>>
>> However this would require relaxation of the license to LGPLv2+ for
>> at least the following modules [*]:
>>
>>   quotearg
>>   quotearg-simple
> 
> I'm definitely okay with quotearg-simple being relaxed, but I worry that
> relaxing quotearg may be counter-productive to protecting value-added of
> gpl code.  On the other hand, it may be that the only reason quotearg is
> gpl is because it uses xalloc, and fixing it to avoid xalloc would then
> clear the way to make it usable from libraries.

I think error messages consistent with the GNU coding standards are
quite important, so I think quotearg/quotearg-simple's code should be LGPL.

>>   xalloc
>>   xalloc-die
>>   xalloc-oversized
> 
> Maybe xalloc-oversized can be LGPLv2+, but xalloc and xalloc-die must
> not be.  Library code must not call exit(), and xalloc-die exists solely
> to call exit().

LGPL hasn't been the Library GPL for quite a while now...

> The xalloc module should remain GPL, and we should
> instead figure out how to break the dependency of quotearg wanting to
> use xalloc.

... but I agree with this anyway.

Paolo