Note that there are a few places where LGPL prerequisites do have
some level of permission. However the two examples that I am aware
of are Polarsys and LocationTech, and the fact that those are run
under separate brands on separate forges was a deciding factor.
As for the next steps, Mike and I
talked previously about this possibility, and instead of just
proceeding without a well-defined LGPL strategy we want to
define one. That is, although the board has rejected LGPL
prereqs, we should present the board with a coherent picture of
the Eclipse Foundation's current policy on LGPL, and how Science
will take advantage of that.
The Eclipse Foundation has a very simple and coherent policy on
LGPL: Eclipse projects are not permitted to use it for their own
code, or for any prerequisites that are distributed with them.
In certain cases, Eclipse projects may use prerequisites which are
licensed under the LGPL. A prerequisite is something which is
already available on a users' machine, as opposed to something which
is distributed with the Eclipse project. One very important example
of this is that the Eclipse IDE uses GTK on Linux. The policy that
describes how this is done can be found at [4].
Mike and I thought some official SWG
policy doc on this would be a good idea because, at the moment,
everything about Eclipse + LGPL is very scattered. If this
policy document is an addendum to the Science TLP
charter/project proposal, then it will be very clear what the
SWG can and cannot support for new and old projects.
I can imagine writing a policy document that makes this all clearer,
but not as an addendum to the Science TLP Charter.