[Pipet Devel] GPL/LGPL issues

[Jean-Marc Valin]

Hi,

I am a developer working on the Piper (http://bioinformatics.org/piper/)
project. We are at the point where we should decide which of the Free licenses
(GPL, LGPL) to use for the project. However, we find that there some unclear (to
us) issues with the (L)GPL when it comes to what is defined as "linking". 

The first one involves a library, libdata-flow which uses plugins by opening
other shared libraries using dlopen(). Is that considered linking? If
libdata-flow's license is the LGPL, would it be allowed to open a GPL plugin?
would it be allow to open a closed-source plugin? (or both at the same time?)
Does the license of the program that links to libdata-flow change the answer to
the previous questions?

Our second issue has to do with CORBA. Is it allowed by the GPL to use CORBA to
link a GPL'd program and a closed-source program?

I hop you can help us resolve our licensing problems. 
Thanks,

	Jean-Marc Valin

-- 
Jean-Marc Valin
Universite de Sherbrooke - Genie Electrique
valj01 at gel.usherb.ca