Wayland License Changing To LGPLv2

Wayland has experienced a surge in development activities from new developers since it was announced Ubuntu will deploy the Wayland Display Server with patches coming in from various developers that address issues from bugs to letting it run on a Linux frame-buffer. Wayland up to this point has been licensed under the MIT / GPLv2 code licenses (depending upon the component), but Kristian Høgsberg has now decided to change the licenses before it's too late and complicated.

The libwayland-server and libwayland-client components that are used to provide an API to the Wayland protocol will now be under the LGPLv2 rather than the MIT code license. The libwayland-client is used by the tool-kit libraries such as Qt, GTK+, Clutter, and any other application wanting to tap Wayland directly. The libwayland-server is used by any Wayland compositor.

Kristian is also going to change Wayland's demo compositor and the sample Wayland clients from being GPLv2 to now be LGPLv2 as well.

This announcement was made on the Wayland mailing list.