Re: What if Guile changed its license to be LGPL?

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

Marius Vollmer wrote:
 > I haven't asked, and I don't really like to go that route.  I
 > (personally) don't want to weaken the license of other peoples
 > software.

That means you shoudl perhaps ask the actual author of GMP (Torbjörn
Granlund) *as well as* RMS.

More importantly, if this complicates Guile and possibly lessens
the "marketing power" of Guile, if may be in the FSF's interested
to work out some kind of exception for Guile.  They don't have to
change the license for GMP in general.  You can add some kind of
exception where as long as an Guile application does not use the
GMP C API directly, but only indirectly via Scheme code or other
public Guile APIs, then the application is still covered by the
Guile license, with exception.

Stallman (and Torbjörn) may be favorably inclined to such as
exception; as Guile maintainer I think you should at least bring up
the issue with RMS.

> What about creating a library that is reasonably compatible to GMP but
> is simple minded and comes with a very unrestrictive license.  It's
> sole purpose would be to make use of the permissive license of
> libguile (and of libgcj, if I understand your intention right).

Somebody wrote such a library.  Some years ago there were problems
with some use of GMP for encryption.  I don't remember the details,
but part of the problem was that since they were linking explicitly
against the GMP API, the FSF argued they were effectivly linking
with the GMP, even if they were separate.  That was resolved by
somebody writing an API-compatible very of GMP.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/per/


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