easyw-fc wrote:Moreover I cannot understand the difficulty for a company to be allowed to install a sw LGPL and not allowed to install a sw GPL.
Correct, using GPL sw in a company isn't a problem at all.
The only limitation would be if they would need to change the code to sell the modified sw without distribute the source code...
The GPL even allows it to modify the code without publishing the changes as long as the company doesn't sell the product. Only when the company starts to sell the product it must publish the sources.
See
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.ht ... stedPublic
prokoudine wrote:This is not even the only instance where it affects FreeCAD. The sole reason LibreDWG is not shipped as part of FreeCAD is because it's GPLv3+
LibreDWG is a different story. At that time when it was considered to use it OCCT was licensed under its own license OCTPL which is similar to LGPL but some people argued that the OCTPL contains a section that makes it incompatible with the GPL. Because Coin3D at that time also was licensed under the GPL and already used by FreeCAD the combination of OCCT and Coin3D was considered problematic and the Debian project stopped distributing FreeCAD and Fedora hasn't even added it to its repositories.
Luckily many people started to talk to OCCT and convinced them to change their license to the LGPL. At the same time the company behind Coin3D lost its interest to further support the library and re-licensed the whole code under BSD-3.
So, from a licensing point of view it would now be possible to use LibreDWG or solvespace but it's a political decision that FreeCAD shouldn't link GPL code.
wandererfan wrote:To release FreeCAD as GPL so as to include GPL s/w, every FreeCAD copyright holder would have to agree to relicense their portion of the code as GPL. Anything that was not re-licensed would have to be replaced.
No, that's wrong. The combination is licensed as GPL but this doesn't affect the license of the LGPL code. Here is a matrix of all combinations of GPL and LGPL:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.ht ... patibility
It's almost everything allowed -- except combining GPLv2-only and GPLv3 because GPLv3 has added some more restrictions and thus became incompatible to the GPLv2