Re: The Guile license and the use of LGPL libs (like GMP).

[Jeff Read]

On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 10:35:44AM -0500, Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> If the analysis is correct, then it seems like we have a few choices:
> 
>   1) Use (and require) GMP anyway and expect people to accomodate the
>      licensing changes.
> 
>   2) Use GMP, but have a configure switch that allows you to omit it,
>      either with fallback non-GMP bignum support, or perhaps no
>      bignums at all.
> 
>   3) Ask the relevant parties whether or not they might be willing to
>      extend the guile exception to GMP, i.e. add a special Guile
>      clause to the GMP license.
> 
>   4) Abandon GMP and continue to do things ourselves.
> 
> Thoughts?

I don't think option 1 is a good idea, both from a licensing standpoint 
(because changing licenses, especially from less restrictive ones to more 
restrictive ones, is tricky) and from a more pragmatic standpoint concerning 
Guile's deployment.

I rather like the notion of Guile as "SIOD on steroids". Basically a relatively 
lightweight, self-contained, but very powerful and RnRS-compliant Scheme with 
strengths in extension and integration. For this purpose, anyway, options 2 and 
4 are best. Option 3 is a possibility if we bundle in GMP with Guile.

Right now I'm compiling Guile out-of-the-box (out-of-the-tarball?) on a stock 
OpenBSD system, which doesn't come all tricked out like a lot of popular 
GNU/Linux distros do. I'd like to continue to be able to do this, and not sweat 
too much about libraries that Guile depends on for its very existence.

-- 
Jeffrey T. Read
"I fight not for me but the blind babe Justice!" --Galford