[Fedora-legal-list] LGPL for noncommercial works only?

[Matt McCutchen]

On Tue, 2010-11-30 at 11:00 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> The wiiuse library from http://www.wiiuse.net/ has an odd license; it is
> GPLv3 or, for noncommercial uses, LGPLv3.  I'm having trouble
> understanding how that kind of use restriction works or if it works at
> all.
> 
> So: Is this kind of thing acceptable for Fedora?  What would the
> License: tag read?

I would interpret "for noncommercial uses, LGPLv3" as a modified license
which is non-free (due to the field-of-use restriction) and incompatible
with LGPLv3 (because there is an additional restriction).  From
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Overview :

        If code is multiple licensed, and at least one of the licenses
        is approved for Fedora, that code can be included in Fedora
        under the approved license(s) (but only under the terms of the
        approved license(s)).

Based on that, the package would be acceptable with a License tag of
GPLv3.

By the way, it's not clear to me whether the choice of GPLv3 rather than
GPLv3+ was intentional.  You might ask upstream whether they will grant
GPLv3+, to to make things easier in the future.

-- 
Matt