[cairo] Pango License

[Travis Griggs]

Is there any hope of Pango every becoming dual licensed?

I just found out today, that because Pango is exclusively LGPL, we're  
dead in the water using it for some of our customers. At least on  
platforms such as OSX and Windows. To name one of huge irony, IBM.  
Which is basically my way of saying, it doesn't matter how much write  
or wrong there is in the argument, it's IBM, and we're just not going  
to win that argument.

I'll continue to support a binding to the library for VisualWorks  
Smalltalk, but we can never hope to have it as any more than an "add  
on" for customers who choose to use it.

I've cross posted this to the Cairo list, because it brings up an  
interesting point (IMO). The project page for Pango says

"The integration of Pango with Cairo (http://cairographics.org/)  
provides a complete solution with high quality text handling and  
graphics rendering."

And that's always the general stance on the lists. You can do a little  
bit of demo stuff with just the Cairo APIs, but if you're serious  
about text, you use Pango. Period.

But Cairo is dual licensed under the MPL, which actually opens a lot  
of doors with a lot of lawyers I've found. But Pango is not, so while  
the technical statement of the above quote is correct, the legal one  
is not.

Sorry for sounding off with my frustration/disappointment.

--
Travis Griggs
tgriggs at cincom.com
"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when  
he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself." - 
Archibald MacLeish, poet and librarian



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