copyright - are version(GPL) libs acceptable?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

Thinking about third party libraries, some useful libs are under
licenses like the GPL. I'm usually among those who reject them
out of hand for Phobos, since tainting it's copyright is not
acceptable.

But, suppose we wrapped all that in a version(GPL):. If the end
user wants to use that stuff, he has to say

dmd myapp.d -version=GPL

Thus he's the one doing the combining. Yes, dmd.zip includes the
GPL'd header file, but it isn't compiled into Phobos except by the
end user. (then again, does the gpl then viral it's way into dmd.zip
as a whole? I wouldn't consider it a derivative work but I'm no
lawyer.)


I've seen other apps do this kind of thing to avoid their code from
being GPL. If the user does the final linking, it seems ok.


Would it work for D? I'm looking for easy ways to expand the newbie
sense of "batteries included" while leveraging the C interface...
the biggest hurdle to that I believe to be copyright, and if that's
explicit on the user end, I *think* we'd be in the clear.