[MonoDevelop] MonoDevelop licensing policy

[Michael Hutchinson]

I was just wondering about the MonoDevelop licensing policy.

I know that MD is GPL as a whole, but new code is mostly MIT X11,
which is a much more 'liberal' license. Why the change?

The original #D codebase was GPL IIRC , but now it's LGPL (to permit
closed-source third-party extensions). Presumably this means that MD
could be relicensed to LGPL too, which would fit in better with the
new code. The only problem would be with the GPL contributions since
the fork, as we'd have to contact the contributors.

I'm not really bothered either way myself, but I suspect that LGPL
would make MD more attractive for commercial tools developers to
support, which might help Windows-based developers moving over to
Linux. It would also be nice to have a less fragmented licensing
policy, and this would be easier to sort out sooner rather than later.

Here's the #D developers' take on the matter:
http://laputa.sharpdevelop.net/SharpDevelop2LicenseChangedToLGPL.aspx

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com