[tz] License of lzip, lzlib and pdlzip

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Bryan Smith wrote:
> There is still a heavy copyleft (e.g., GPL) v. non-copyleft FLOSS
> debate that rages on, with various people putting various values --
> from nothing to everything -- on that.  lzip -- or more problematic,
> it's lzlib -- is GPLv2 -- not even LGPL -- which has some asterisks
> for commercial developers.  I don't know the state of public domain
> lzip (pdlzip), but it seems to be good enough for any decompression
> (and most general compression).

Thanks for your comments. I'll just add a clarification about lzip 
licensing.

Lzip itself is GPL version 2 or later.

Lzlib was also GPLv2+, but a year ago (in version 1.9) the license was 
changed to 2-clause BSD as you can see in lzlib's homepage[1]. There is 
also another BSD licensed library (libarchive) able to (de)compress lzip 
files and lzip-compressed tar archives.

Pdlzip has a 2-clause BSD license[2]. It is maintained and fully 
compatible with the lzip format for both compression and decompression.

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzlib.html
[2] http://www.nongnu.org/lzip/pdlzip.html

Best regards,
Antonio.