ODBC component licenses

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:36:38 -0500, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  
wrote:

> On Thursday, November 10, 2011 10:29 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:10:26 -0500, Jonathan M Davis  
>> <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>
>>
>> wrote:
>> > On Thursday, November 10, 2011 05:23 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> >> On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:55:01 -0500, Steve Teale
>> >>
>> >> <steve.teale at britseyeview.com> wrote:
>> >> > The libraries for unixODBC and for FreeTDS (communication with SQL
>> >> > Server) are LGPL.
>> >> >
>> >> > Would a D ODBC driver that used these be compatible with Phobos?
>> >>
>> >> glibc, which dmd (and all Linux binaries) rely on is LGPL. So if you  
>> are
>> >> saying what I think you are saying, yes. As long as the LGPL code is
>> >> kept
>> >> in a *separate* shared object, it is perfectly legal to link with it
>> >> without infecting phobos' license.
>> >
>> > Though the fact that it needs to be in a separate shared object does
>> > make it
>> > problematic to stick in Phobos, since Phobos is just one shared  
>> object.
>> > So, if
>> > he's looking to put it _in_ Phobos, then I don't think that we can do
>> > that
>> > with the current setup.
>>
>> My understanding is that the FreeTDS is its *own* shared object  
>> (installed
>> separately). We cannot include LGPL code in phobos.lib.
>
> I'm afraid that I've never even heard of TDS, so I'm not quite sure how  
> that
> relates. We theoretically _could_ provide LGPL code in a separate  
> library, but
> we don't do anything like that now.

I wasn't sure so I looked it up:

http://www.freetds.org/faq.html#where.is.libtds.so

Apparently, you can still have LGPL code that is statically linked?  I'm  
not sure now how that works, my understanding was always that LGPL works  
because of shared objects.

-Steve