[logback-dev] Reverted logback license back to LGPL

[Ceki Gulcu]

Hi Joern,

The licensing questions are extremely complex. It's one area I would
not want to get too creative. Most of the major project which use LGPL
use v2.1, e.g. Hibernate. Moreover, if someone is more comfortable with
LGPL v3, they can just use it, as the logback license reads:

<quote>
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
</quote>

So, there is no uncertainty, or considering the OSS licensing
mess, there is nothing but uncertainty as soon as you look into the
subject carefully.

IANAL,


Joern Huxhorn wrote:
> Hi Ceki,
> 
> might I suggest to change the license from LGPL V2 to LGPL V3?
> 
> The Apache Software License 2.0 isn't compatible with GPL2, only with  
> GPL3, so software distributed using Apache Software License probably  
> wouldn't be allowed to use logback.
> 
> http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/#apache2
> 
> While LGPL allows the use of a later version as an option in its  
> license text, I'm not really sure if this is sufficient to use it with  
> ASL...
> 
> Common sense indicates yes but the above link indicates no.
> 
> I'm not sure about LGPL anyway because there only seems to be a  
> problem with GPL.
> 
> So if you don't see a problem with V3 it would be nice to just be  
> explicit about it. Just to get rid of the uncertainty :)
> 
> IANAL,
> Joern.
> 
-- 
Ceki Gülcü