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.