Insight Rewrite: Licensing

Today's topic is more of a religious nature: Licensing.



Until now, all files have been just licensed under the GPL. We now switched to a mixed system which makes sense for us.



The new licenses we use include: GPL (of course), LGPL and public domain.



To start with the latter: we took some minimal implementations from mailing lists or other publicly available archives and silently used them. To tag them as GPL is not correct as by appearing publicly we consider these to be public domain already. Also, we put the examples of the manual and some tool scripts under it. The GPL is fine but for some simple scripts this is just overkill.



LGPL. In the very end we want to at least have the core part under LGPL. The reason is quite simple: there're no real algorithms but rather wrapper functions putting libraries (which are themselves under LGPL) behind a convenient API for use in muttng. As the underlying libraries are LGPL to have proprietary software benefit from it, why shouldn't benefits from our abstraction layer be possible? Currently only the files we wrote completely from scratch are put under it. Files containing portions of old code are left under GPL, of course.



GPL. Right now the libmuttng part contains just too many fractions of old code so it cannot be simply put under LGPL. We hope we have time to replace these parts step by step so we can replace GPL-dependencies of our new code by new LGPL-code to, in the end, make libmuttng licensed under LGPL, too. The muttng part (i.e. all tools and applications) will remain GPL as "just an example of how to use the libraries."



As it turns out, there always are dicussions when (partial) license switches appear. So everyone is invited to comment on it.



If somebody discovers parts of old code now tagged as being LGPL, please notify us as this is a serious mistake and license violation not done intentionally.