[rrd-developers] Relicensing of src/rrd_client.[ch]

[Tobias Oetiker]

Today Florian Forster wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:41:15PM +0200, Tobias Oetiker wrote:
> > Florian, can you share the motivation behind the licensing change ?
>
> I was asked today if it was possible to add support for sending data to
> rrdcached to a proprietary application. My first thought was "yes, of
> course" but then reality caught up with me and I realized that I wasn't
> in the cotton-candy-free-software-world.. ;)
>
> The FSF interprets the GPL so that dynamically linking with a library is
> already considered a "derived work", so a GPL'ed library can essentially
> only be used by a project using a GPL-compatible license itself.
>
> The rrd_client.[ch] interface is basically a thin abstraction layer over
> the network protocol. Since new implementations of a network protocol
> often introduce little incompatibilities or lack some features, I think
> it's best to let non-GPL software use those abstraction layers, too.

fine with me :-)

cheers
tobi

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
http://it.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch ++41 62 775 9902 / sb: -9900