There seems to be some confusion here. No one is proposing changing
Maxima licensing (which is GPL). The question is whether a particular
Lisp implementation (GCL) should be under LGPL or GPL.
> As far as Maxima goes, I think the consensus was that this
> was probably a good thing.
Maxima is under the GPL, and I haven't heard anyone suggest changing
that (even if it were possible). So there is no issue there. Putting
GCL under the GPL will not make Maxima any more or less free.
GCL is currently licensed under the LGPL. That means that programs
which *use* GCL as their bundled execution environment are not
encumbered by the terms of GPL or LGPL licensing, but have a free choice
of licenses, from Apache to BSD to LGPL to GPL to fully proprietary. On
the other hand, the LGPL makes sure that direct derivatives of GCL
remain free, so there will never be a non-free fork of GCL.
Some consider this freedom desirable because they think that authors
should choose the license for their own work (and that different
licenses are appropriate for different circumstances); others consider
it undesirable because it does not discourage authors from making their
own work proprietary (the FSF position, see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html).
That is, putting GCL under the GPL (rather than the LGPL) is not about
protecting the free nature of GCL (or Maxima), but about deterring
authors from using non-GPL-compatible licenses, and impelling them to
put their own code under the GPL. I am not comfortable with this
tactic, which (mutatis mutandis) could just as well be used *against*
free software as for it.
-s