On Sat, Nov 9, 2019 at 8:29 AM Mark H Weaver <m...@netris.org> wrote:
> You're mistaken. A GPLed library can be used by any program covered by > a *GPL-compatible* license. > At the cost of making the resulting work as a whole under the GPL. > Those are major historical examples, but the same thing happens quite > frequently and unremarked in smaller examples, whenever a boss would > reflexively tell an employee that a program they wrote should be kept > proprietary, but is compelled to make it free software because it > depends on a copylefted library (such a Guile-JSON). > Well, I suppose that happens; certainly it has happened in the past, as your examples show. However, all the bosses I have worked for in the last few decades (and I've made my living for forty years as most programmers do, by writing proprietary software), simply say "No GPLed components, ever. If he has to pay for me or another to write the components ourselves, he'd much rather do that than the alternative. My present employer takes a slightly more enlightened view. Employes are free to contribute to existing open-source projects on whatever terms. Like most, we use GPLed programs in proprietary shell scripts, which the FSF allows, and I wrote and GPLed a wrapper around an existing GPLv3 library to transform it into a server (our code opens a raw TCP connection, writes data, reads the results back). That repo is not yet publicly available, but it will be made so when the release that uses it is distributed to our customers. > Whether or not a GPLed JSON library requires the Scheme implementation > > to be itself GPL depends on the implementation, but certainly a > > stand-alone *application* that uses it would have to be. > > Again, you are mistaken. Check your facts, please. See > <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIsCompatible>. > That page defines GPL-compatibility thus: "[If] the other license and the GNU GPL are compatible, you can combine code released under the other license with code released under the GNU GPL in one larger program. All GNU GPL versions permit such combinations privately; they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version." Thus if the JSON library is combined into the Scheme implementation as part of it, and that implementation is released, it must be released under the GPL. If a stand-alone application (as opposed to a mere script that invokes the implementation) written in Scheme makes use of a GPLed library, it too (if publicly distributed) must be GPLed. That's what I said As for clang, Apple funded it for commercial reasons, but there were efforts among BSD developers to write their own C compiler for years before that, though they came to nothing. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan co...@ccil.org Ambassador Trentino: I've said enough. I'm a man of few words. Rufus T. Firefly: I'm a man of one word: scram! --Duck Soup