LGPL vs. GPL + Classpath Exception

[Wilson, Andrew]

David Woolley wrote

>> allowing reverse engineering), and there may be maintainers and 
>> contributors who balk at relicensing from these historic exceptions
to
>> LGPL.
>
> That shouldn't be the case for the FSF libraries, as they request 
> copyright assignments before they will include code in the material
they 
> distribute under their own name.

You are certainly correct that FSF has assignment of copyright for the
projects they manage and may relicense as they see fit.  However,
in the hypothetical event maintainers and contributors for a given
project
like the "old" FSF license better than the "new" FSF license, they may
take the code base under the "old" license and fork it.  It's a
hard problem to write one license to take the place of three
(GPL+classpath, GPL+runtime, LGPLv2) and keep everyone involved happy.

I know this is, strictly speaking, off-topic for this list, but since
FSF people (Richard Fontana et al.) do read license-discuss, if they
could
comment on FSF's library licensing plan going forward, I personally
would find it interesting.

Andy Wilson
Intel Open Source Technology Center