Brad Hards wrote: > I'm not aware of any part of poppler that is not "GPL version 2 or > later". Can you point to a "v2 only" part that is actually linked > into the library?
Poppler is a fork of xpdf, which is GPLv2 only (I'm sure you know that). As such, it cannot be released under GPLv3 unless all xpdf code is rewritten. Of course, the poppler developers (yourself included) can release their code under GPLv2+, but this only means that someone can reuse *that specific code* under GPLv2+ -- i.e. it is not possible to link a GPLv3 app against poppler, and it is not possible to link a GPLv2+ app against poppler *and* a library under LGPLv3. Some consequences of this are well known -- for example, GLib/GTK+ can't migrate to LGPLv3+ because that would rule out Evince (since it links against poppler), libgoffice->Gnumeric, etc, and probably lots of other applications that are important for the GNOME desktop (and maybe Xfce/LXDE too). The GNUstep librararies were released under LGPLv3, and subsequently downgraded to LGPLv2.1 because Vindaloo.app links with poppler (via PopplerKit), the GWorkspace PDF Inspector does that too, Terminal.app has some Linux code, etc., etc. Poppler is a major technical obstacle towards the adoption of (L)GPLv3 (by "technical" I mean when the copyright holders wish to use the new licenses, but they cannot for compatibility issues because of the libraries they use). I'd wish it was the only one, but it's not.
