Re: proposed FAQ entries about licensing

[Judd Storrs]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 3:52 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> Are you sure about FLTK?  It appears to me that it is LGPLv2 or any
> later version plus some exceptions.  At least that is what the file
> /usr/share/doc/libfltk1.1-dev/copyright on my Debian system tells me,
> and that also appears to be consistent with the files in
> /usr/include/FL on my system that have copyright notices.  But even if
> it were strictly LGPLv2 only, then I think the chart you reference
> above says that we can still link with it.  We just can't incorporate
> parts of it in Octave (i.e., cut and paste code directly from the FLTK
> sources into the Octave sources) unless we can relicense it using
> GPLv3.

/usr/share/doc/libfltk1.1-dev/changelog.Debian.gz on my machine only
mentions up to fltk-1.1.7. It may be that Debian has chosen to stick
at libfltk-1.1.7 due to the license change. COPYING inside the latest
stable fltk-1.1.9 tarball on fltk.org lists the license as the FLTK
license.

http://www.fltk.org/COPYING.php

The FLTK license appears to be GPLv2 only plus some other freedoms
that unfortunately don't seem to look GPL compatible. There's some
recent discussion going on at debian-legal about the FLTK license.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2009/03/msg00098.html

--judd