[cairo] Pango License

[Travis Griggs]

On Dec 16, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Andrew Mason wrote:

>> Because of this, use of LGPL libraries was out of the question.
>
> Does it really matter that it couldn't be used in this scenario ?
> There are a whole bunch of people / projects using it already. Even if
> a few hundred proprietary applications were able to start using it
> does anyone really care. Except maybe those companies who are
> unwilling to abide by the terms of the LGPL in which case why do they
> deserve the advantages of using such a library?
>
> Basically what i'm saying is, what is the point of (contemplating) a
> changing a license for the slim chance that a proprietary company (
> which obviously isn't in a sharing mode ) is going to contribute back
> some patches.

I don't think we're contemplating anything at this point. Owen Taylor  
made it pretty clear the Pango license isn't changing.

I don't know if I'd call (as an example) IBM a proprietary company  
that isn't in a sharing mode. There's this thing called Eclipse, you  
may have heard of it. And the ICU/CLDR stuff is funded primarily by  
IBM'ers.

As for the notion of "selling out" to placate a company, that's a bit  
ironic to point out in the Cairo list. Cairo is dual licensed. My  
recollection is that Mozilla has paid quite few a people over the  
years to contribute to Cairo, and interestingly enough, we ended up  
with the MPL bolted into Cairo alongside the LGPL. I'm curious where  
Cairo would be today without the investment in coding time put in by  
Mozilla employees. Is Mozilla to be blamed for not "being willing to  
abide the LGPL?"

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"Every institution finally perishes by an excess of its own first  
principle." - Lord Acton