Re: GNU Libtool - Licensing

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Christopher,

My current employer does not sign FSF disclaimers, so I have not been able to 
work on libtool for the last 4 years.  I’m Cc:ing the libtool list where you 
might find someone who can help.

However, the intent of the exceptions is to allow you to build your software 
using libtool without forcing you to license your own code as GPL - anything 
that suggests otherwise is certainly an oversight or a misunderstanding.

I see that the upstream sources for options-parser have had their license texts 
updated since the last libtool release:

  
https://github.com/gnulib-modules/bootstrap/blob/master/build-aux/options-parser

...so, in the worst case you could rebootstrap your libtool tree with the 
latest gnulib and bootstrap-modules to get an ltmain.sh without the confusing 
licenses?

Cheers,
Gary

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 8, 2019, at 6:27 AM, Christoph Stubhann <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hello Gary,
> 
> first of all I wanted to thank you and your colleagues for your ongoing 
> effort to provide useful tools for the international community; you're doing 
> a great job, for all of us! ;)
> 
> I am currently working on a small media library that utilizes Gstreamer for 
> audio and video streaming.
> A friend of mine pointed out that I should keep in mind under which software 
> license I put my media library, just in case I wanted to publish it someday.
> When I took a closer look into the files of the Gstreamer library, I 
> discovered that there is a file named "ltmain.sh" in the package, which seems 
> to be a generated file for GNU Libtool and which is composed of a couple of 
> other scripts, right?
> For most of these scripts there are exceptions in the license header, but for 
> the options-parser script the license header states that it is under the GPL 
> v3 license without any exception.
> Will this cause the whole "ltmain.sh" file (and therefore the whole Gstreamer 
> library package, and therefore also my media library) to become licensed 
> under GPL v3? And is the absence of an exception in the license header of the 
> options-parser script intentional? Or is it maybe just a little careless 
> mistake?
> Please forgive me my possible ignorance, but the whole licensing topic is 
> very new to me.
> I hope you can help me with this matter; thanks in advance! :)
> 
> Kind regards,
> Chris