On palm-dev-forum on Wed, Feb 26, 2003, Ron Nicholson wrote:
> AFAIK, there isn't a shared library mechanism for armlets, required
> for MathLib which is a LGPL'd library.
A library licensed according to the LGPL does not require a shared
library mechanism. An alternative is to link it statically and also
distribute your application in (suitably shrouded) object form suitable
for relinking with a new version of the library by the end user. To be
sure, this is a whole lot less convenient than using a shared library ;-).
> But the functions in the Sun fdlibm library (the same code without the
> library license)
For quite a while now I've been wondering where this "MathLib is fdlibm"
meme came from. Rick Huebner claims that the m68k MathLib comes from
GCC 2.7.2.2's libm (although I suspect he means some version of glibc
rather than GCC?), and that that in turn is "based on free code
originally developed by Sun Microsytems".
But that does not imply that the MathLib code is the *same* as the
fdlibm code. It could be that the code was improved during its time in
GCC/glibc (or not); any such improvements would of course be available
licensed according to the LGPL but not according to fdlibm's license.
More evidence would be interesting...
John "and then there's Cephes"
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
