From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Marius Vollmer Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.user Subject: Re: What if Guile changed its license to be LGPL? Date: 06 Jun 2002 00:45:22 +0200 Sender: guile-user-admin@gnu.org Message-ID: <87lm9tgxa5.fsf@zagadka.ping.de> References: <87elfmu98g.fsf@zagadka.ping.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1023317697 1270 127.0.0.1 (5 Jun 2002 22:54:57 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2002 22:54:57 +0000 (UTC) Cc: guile-user@gnu.org Return-path: Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1 (Debian)) id 17Fjg7-0000K4-00 for ; Thu, 06 Jun 2002 00:54:56 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=fencepost.gnu.org) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 17FjZU-0004ML-00; Wed, 05 Jun 2002 18:48:04 -0400 Original-Received: from dialin.speedway42.dip7.dokom.de ([195.138.42.7] helo=zagadka.ping.de) by fencepost.gnu.org with smtp (Exim 3.34 #1 (Debian)) id 17FjX3-0003j8-00 for ; Wed, 05 Jun 2002 18:45:34 -0400 Original-Received: (qmail 945 invoked by uid 1000); 5 Jun 2002 22:45:22 -0000 Original-To: Neil Jerram In-Reply-To: Original-Lines: 56 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 Errors-To: guile-user-admin@gnu.org X-BeenThere: guile-user@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.9 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: General Guile related discussions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.user:544 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.user:544 Neil Jerram writes: > >>>>> "Marius" == Marius Vollmer writes: > > Marius> Guile currently has a license [...] If we would change the > Marius> license of Guile to be the Lesser GPL, would you stop > Marius> using it? > > I think this whole discussion is barking up the wrong tree. > > We had a similar problem before with readline -- and solved it -- and > no doubt we will have similar problems in future with other packages > whose licences may be subtly incompatible with Guile's. > > The solution is to arrange things so that it becomes a runtime problem > rather than a distribution problem. That is one solution, but not the only one. It's also not the best for all possible variations of the 'problem'. Making it a compile-time problem would also work, i.e., fixing the license of libguile at configure time, and I am now convinced that the legal consequences are tolerable for people who want the weak license. A compile-time configuration switch is mostly inferior to a run-time switch, agreed. But I would like to keep the possibility of deciding between the two based on technical reasons, not on legal ones. For example, removing bignums from Guile but having the possibility to re-add them at run-time via GOOPS would be elegant, but maybe it would simply be too slow. In my view, bignums are very essential to Guile, on par with proper tail-call handling, say, and they deserve to be deeply integrated. (They also deserve to be present even without GMP...) Other issues have other parameters. The readline library does not need to be deeply integrated into Guile (IMO), and its license is GPL instead of LGPL. This changes enough, I think, to choose the run-time switch option for libreadline. Back to GMP, possible solution would also be to change the license of GMP, or the license of Guile, so that the two would be equal. This thread was meant to explore the possibility of changing the license of Guile, and at the same time produce arguments for changing the license of GMP. You say we shouldn't bother since we can 'just' make this a run-time issue. I think we should explore a license change anyway, and I also think that shifting the problem to run-time (and thereby out of the licenses' reach) would not be really satisfactory. > In fact, "problem" is too negative. I'd say this is an opportunity to > get a number of things right: That opportunity still exists, even if we find a different solution for GMP. ;-) _______________________________________________ Guile-user mailing list Guile-user@gnu.org http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-user