[I18n-sig] Codec licenses

[M.-A. Lemburg]

"Martin v. Loewis" wrote:
> 
> > I haven't received any comment on the above so far.
> >
> > Should I take this as rejection of the proposal ?
> 
> I wasn't going to go into a long discussion about that matter, but I
> feel quite comfortable with the iconv codec being GPL'ed. Your main
> rationale for requesting such a change was
> 
> > This makes the codecs unusable for software which isn't GPL
> > compatible and limits its usefulness considerably.
> 
> I firmly believe that free software should be useful on its own
> technical merits, and that the LGPL is called the "lesser" GPL for a
> reason; the FSF actively encourages authors *not* to license software
> under its terms.
> 
> I could be talked into changing the license if some project that I
> support would want to use it, and couldn't because of the GPL (e.g. if
> it was candidate for inclusion into Python). I won't change in
> advance.

Writing an iconv package has been on my list of "nice projects"
for a while. Unfortunately, I haven't found time to look into
this. After having seen you code up something along those lines,
I dropped the idea... I guess I'll have to revive it again :-/

Note that iconv itself is distributed under the LGPL, so nothing
would prevent me from writing a codec package under a Python
style license. The same applies to all other codecs. 

I still think that such a needless effort could be avoided if 
people were to play nice. We could then wrap a nice codec extension
package for everyone to use at their will.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
______________________________________________________________________
Company:                                        http://www.egenix.com/
Consulting:                                    http://www.lemburg.com/
Python Pages:                           http://www.lemburg.com/python/