[MonoDevelop] MonoDevelop licensing policy

[Lluis Sanchez]

El dl 26 de 03 del 2007 a les 13:51 +0100, en/na Michael Hutchinson va
escriure:
> 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,Well, you are answering the question yourself belo
> which is a much more 'liberal' license. Why the change?

To make it possible in the future (when all the code base is not GPL) to
develop plugins which are not GPL.

> 
> 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.

That's correct.

> 
> 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.

That's the goal.

> It would also be nice to have a less fragmented licensing
> policy, and this would be easier to sort out sooner rather than later.

Our policy is clear: new code must be either MIT X11 or LGPL. Old GPL
code will be either relicensed or rewritten.

Lluis.