NSIS has gone LGPL???

[RDaneel]

Well, if you use the LZMA compression, that would appear to be case.

Please tell me that you guys got permission from Igor to release under a "LGPL with linking exception" license. But only if it's true, of course.

Note that I have been away from the NSIS community for a few months, and if this has already been covered here I apologize for raking it up again - but I *did* do a forum search on "LGPL" and didn't see anything that seemed to pertain.

Anyway, I was writing up an entry in my site's News section, talking about the new packaging release of my software based on the new NSIS installer (including LZMA compression, which I used)...

Since I was of course providing links to NSIS and (I assumed) 7-zip, I went looking for the NSIS project's acknowledgement of the contribution from the 7-zip project.

I didn't find anything like that, just ordinary LGPL license notices.

Imagine my surprise and disappointment to find that a truly "open" project like NSIS has started incorporating components carrying incompatible licenses.

I *really* hope that this is just confusion on my part, and that NSIS users can actually use LZMA with a "linking exception"... otherwise, I will have to pull my software packages and re-re-release them, back with good ol' bzip2.

Finally, while as they say over on Slashdot, IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), I wonder how clear the legal position is even if an NSIS user chooses *not* to use [7-zip -based] LZMA compression... while it is fairly clear that if you generate an installer which *does* use LZMA, you end up being subject to the LGPL terms, and since the NSIS system *itself* now incorporates the LGPL code, *it* would now be subject to those terms.

BUT (and it is a large one), it seems at least intuitively clear that NSIS installers *not* using LZMA are probably "clean"... remember, IANAL, and the legal definition of "derivative work" is definitely getting some stretching today - just look at what SCO is up to!