guile-lib licensing (input requested)

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hey hackers,

In an attack of CADT[0], I have decided to move Guile-lib to
savannah.nongnu.org, so that Guile contributors can more easily
contribute to Guile-lib. I've also migrated to Git.

As part of the savannah submission process, Sebastian Gerhardt
rightfully pointed out some schitzophrenia regarding licensing. Many of
our sources come from the public domain, but some of our code is GPL.

We should probably have some kind of policy regarding licenses. Here are
some options that I can think of:

  1) Guile-lib itself has no one license. Individual modules have
     clearly-stated licenses.

     Advantage: reflects the current situation.

     Disadvantage: difficult for the user to know the licenses of the
     software they are using. License of the tarball as a whole is
     ambiguous.

  2) Guile-lib has one license, the GPLv3+.

     Advantage: Clarity, and supportive of software freedom.

     Disadvantage: License is different from that of Guile (LGPLv2+,
     perhaps becoming v3+). Much more restrictive than some
     public-domain sources that we base our work on (e.g. ssax).

  3) One license, the LGPLv3+.

     Advantage: Clarity, harmony with Guile's license.

     Disadvantage: Getting some GPL code relicensed to LGPL, although
     there's not that many contributors for GPL code. A weaker support
     for software freedom.

What do people think?

Btw: until the guile-lib submission goes through, you can get guile-lib
from git as follows:

   git clone http://wingolog.org/git/guile-lib.git

Cheers,

Andy

[0] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
-- 
http://wingolog.org/