VLC's change to a LGPL v2 licence

The basic difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that software under the LGPL can be incorporated into proprietary software as well. It is still free software; the difference is that it can now also become part of proprietary programs.

I read the link you posted, and it says that "The license of the VLC media player will continue to be GPLv2 or later. This will not impact normal users of VLC in any way." So apparently it's only the VLC engine that's being re-licensed, not the media player program itself.

VLC's engine being LGPLv2 doesn't make it any less freer than if it was under the full GPL. What it does is allow proprietary products to be built on top of it.

The full GPL, besides giving every user the "Four Freedoms," also provides an incentive for developers to contribute to the free software world, by providing a mass of code that can only be in free software and not proprietary. Several packages, including CLISP (a Common Lisp implementation) and GCC Objective-C, are GPL only because their developers decided freeing their code was an acceptable tradeoff for using GPL'd GNU packages. As Dr. Stallman explains, this was an intended effect of the GPL.

The LGPL was created to induce proprietary developers onto the GNU platform in order to make the platform more popular. It's one of the very rare cases that Dr. Stallman makes such a decision, as he usually believes it's a "ruinous compromise." GNU intended to use the LGPL for projects that provided what was already available as proprietary or BSD/Apache-licensed libraries, the idea being that applying the full GPL to such projects only harms its development.

Many projects choose weaker free software licenses such as LGPL or even BSD/Apache-style licenses because they would rather attract as many developers as possible, with the idea that this makes the software more powerful and reliable. This is the Apache Software Foundation's approach, and judging by the well-known reliability and security of Apache projects, it works. This is presumably what VLC is aiming for.

GNU takes a different approach; it seeks to maximize the the freedoms that the eventual user (or "end-user" or "consumer", although I dislike both terms) has. Anything that increases the amount of free software is a win for GNU. That's why GNU (well, Dr. Stallman really) speaks out against the Apache-type approach; because, as they've seen with the X window system (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html), since X is not copyleft, many users of X were actually using non-free versions of it.

Even when GNU projects allow proprietary derivatives, they want to make sure the original work stays free; that's the purpose of LGPL.

VLC's engine being LGPLv2 doesn't make it any less freer than if it was under
the full GPL. What it does is allow proprietary products to be built on top
of it.

The full GPL, besides giving every user the "Four Freedoms," also provides an
incentive for developers to contribute to the free software world, by
providing a mass of code that can only be in free software and not
proprietary. Several packages, including CLISP (a Common Lisp implementation)
and GCC Objective-C, are GPL only because their developers decided freeing
their code was an acceptable tradeoff for using GPL'd GNU packages. As Dr.
Stallman explains, this was an intended effect of the GPL.

The LGPL was created to induce proprietary developers onto the GNU platform
in order to make the platform more popular. It's one of the very rare cases
that Dr. Stallman makes such a decision, as he usually believes it's a
"ruinous compromise." GNU intended to use the LGPL for projects that provided
what was already available as proprietary or BSD/Apache-licensed libraries,
the idea being that applying the full GPL to such projects only harms its
development.

Many projects choose weaker free software licenses such as LGPL or even
BSD/Apache-style licenses because they would rather attract as many
developers as possible, with the idea that this makes the software more
powerful and reliable. This is the Apache Software Foundation's approach, and
judging by the well-known reliability and security of Apache projects, it
works. This is presumably what VLC is aiming for.

GNU takes a different approach; it seeks to maximize the the freedoms that
the eventual user (or "end-user" or "consumer", although I dislike both
terms) has. Anything that increases the amount of free software is a win for
GNU. That's why GNU (well, Dr. Stallman really) speaks out against the
Apache-type approach; because, as they've seen with the X window system
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html), since X is not copyleft, many users
of X were actually using non-free versions of it.

Even when GNU projects allow proprietary derivatives, they want to make sure
the original work stays free; that's the purpose of LGPL.