On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.comSimetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com

wrote:

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:

[Two reasons to relicense as part of breaking into libraries:]

a) To encourage reuse and

...

b) Avoid debates about using the libraries with other non-GPL code (eg. under PHP license)

The exact same considerations apply to MediaWiki as a whole, though, and there are also considerations in favor of GPL. Clearly some people prefer BSD, but what does this have to do with breaking code out into libraries? It seems orthogonal, so I was puzzled by you mentioning it in this particular context. (You can license your files as BSD if you like even if they're in MediaWiki core, or at least some people have done that.)

It's not strictly orthogonal. It's pretty common practice to have separate licensing for libraries and other reusable components as opposed to finished applications. Precedent: KDE: http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy GNOME: http://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment/Guidelines

Rob