Re: proposed FAQ entries about licensing

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Apr-2009, Judd Storrs wrote:

| On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Judd Storrs <address@hidden> wrote:
| > 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
| 
| Sorry, I misread and mistyped slightly. The FLTK license is a modified
| "LGPLv2 only" not "GPLv2 only", which doesn't really help the
| compatibility of the recent releases because I don't think it can
| promote to GPLv3.

It doesn't need to, provided that we are only linking to the library,
not copying code from it for use directly in the Octave sources.

Look again at the GPL compatibility matrix.  Octave is the GPLv3
application (one of the columns under the "I want to release a project
under:" heading).  Now look at the lower part of the chart (the rows
labeled "I want to use a library under:" heading).  Linking GPLv3 with
LGPL (any version) is OK.  The only problem is with GPLv2 only.  So I
don't see the problem for linking Octave and FLTK.

Yes, the situation is different if we wanted to copy some code out of
FLTK for use directly in Octave.  But we are not doing that, so I
don't see that there is a problem with the FLTK license.

jwe