On Thu, 8 Jul 1999, Santiago Vila wrote: > Hi *, > > To deal with a wishlist bug with which I agree, I'm going to replace the > LGPL in base-files by the new "Lesser GNU Public License", which is also > called "LGPL". Since the new LGPL is the successor of the old LGPL, I > would consider that copyright files saying "you will find the Library GNU > Public License in /usr/whatever..." do not become "broken" because of this > change. > > The funny thing is that policy says that packages licensed under the > "LGPL" should refer to the LGPL file in base-files, but does not > explicitly say what LGPL stands for :-). > > I think this may now be ambiguous, but acceptable. > > Does somebody feel the need to clarificate this, so that it explicitly > says whether it refers to the old LGPL, the new one, or both of them?
The GNU LGPL version 2.0 (which you refer to as the old one) was originally called the Library General Public License due to the fact that it is used by some libraries (for example, the GNU C Library). A couple of months ago, it was renamed to the GNU Lesser General Public License in order to reflect the three facts that (1) it is not exclusively for libraries, (2) libraries can also use the "standard" General Public License, and (3) it provides less freedom than ordinary GPL because it does not guarantee the freedom of programs which link against the code covered by this license. The license you refer to the new one is the LGPL version 2.1, a minor revision of the former. Both are correctly called Lesser General Public License, and the term Library General Public License is a historical artifact (hence, all references to the latter should be changed to the former). -- Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.ndn.net/ "As time goes on, my signature gets shorter and shorter..." - me
