Re: The Guile license and the use of LGPL libs (like GMP).

[Marius Vollmer]

address@hidden (Robert Uhl <address@hidden>) writes:

> Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > >   LDOPTS=`guile-config --license=gpl link`
> > 
> > Yes, or rather "--license=lgpl".
> 
> Yuck.  Most guile-using software will be gpl-compatible.  Make the
> developers of proprietary software use the ugly option.

Yes, I'm considering that.  I would like this much better myself.

As far as I see right now (I am currently being educated behind the
scenes about licensing details), the risk for a developer to
accidentally violate the license of Guile will be very small.  Such a
violation can only happen when (parts of) Guile are distributed
together with the non-free software and we can expect the developers
to know what they are distributing.  When Guile is not distributed
with the non-free software (i.e. the non-free software uses dynamic
linking or comes as non-free source), the author of the non-free
software is not affected by Guile's license, whatever it is.

So, it would probably be OK to prominently announce the change of the
default license of Guile, and simply ask people who want to use the
weak license to take care to distribute a properly configured Guile.


All this will effectively allow non-free software to use a free
software library (GMP), albeit indirectly.