Re: license ambiguity in guile exception to the gpl

[Neil W. Van Dyke]

For an example of the ambiguity, it's not clear to me that a developer
is permitted to distribute "boot-9.scm" and all the other "guile-core"
files with a non-GPL'd application.

This ambiguity might defeat the intention of the Guile GPL exception.

It might also confuse authors about how their code will be licensed if
contributed to the Guile project.

I think it'd be good to clarify this in the documentation and comments
before Guile 1.6 release.

(Aside: When we get into any kind of code interaction that doesn't occur
via our traditional notions of native object code linking (static or
dynamic) on the end user's machine, such as when we have substantial
non-native-code runtime files, server-side use of GPL'd code,
interaction through sockets, etc., we get into weaknesses of the GPL's
definitions.  RMS recognizes this is a difficult and important problem,
but I don't know how close we are to an updated GPL.)

Neil W. Van Dyke (nwv)


Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes at 02:12 21-May-2001 +0200:
> From: Marius Vollmer <address@hidden>
> To: "Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: license ambiguity in guile exception to the gpl
> Date: 21 May 2001 02:12:16 +0200
> 
> "Neil W. Van Dyke" <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Is *all* the text in `guile-core' covered by the Guile GPL exception?
> 
> Yes, I think that is the intention.  However, the exception is quite
> limited and speaks only about linking with the Guile library.
> 
> > `boot-9.scm', for example, contains the usual GPL comments without
> > mention of the Guile GPL exception.
> 
> boot-9.scm is not part of the Guile library in the sense that you can
> link it into your program.
> 
> In what way does an ambiguity arise?

-- 
                                          Neil W. Van Dyke <address@hidden>
                                          http://www.neilvandyke.org/