copyright - are version(GPL) libs acceptable?

Daniel Gibson metalcaedes at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 20:12:01 PDT 2011


Am 09.06.2011 05:04, schrieb 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 don't think so.

> 
> 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.
> 

Dunno.. probably it's ok as long as no binaries are redistributed.
I guess in other cases it's more like "if you compile the GPL stuff in
the whole code is implicitly GPL".
But note that GPL != LGPL and linking (shared) LGPL libraries doesn't go
viral on the program that links them. Fortunately most libraries use
LGPL and not "normal" GPL.

> 
> 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.

Besides legal problems I think including a bunch of 3rd party libs
causes some maintaining overhead.. imagine one of the included libs has
a critical security vulnerability - you'd have to release an updated dmd
distribution..

Maybe(!) it's better to just supply interfaces (which would also prevent
legal problems because it's questionable if you can even copyright
headers and D ports of them shouldn't be a problem at all) and let the
user provide the libraries. On Linux this probably is relatively
painless (e.g. let the deb package suggest/recommend the appropriate
libs), but I guess on Windows it's not as painless, because the user
would have to find and install the libs himself.
Dunno about OSX.


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