[Pipet Devel] license nominations

Jean-Marc Valin jean-marc.valin at hermes.usherb.ca
Mon Sep 11 20:50:11 EDT 2000


> Well, that is another issue.  The UIL can contain any number of UI's that work
> with Piper through CORBA.  Perhaps you're talking about Pied and Peep.  They
> too may have plugins (UI-dependent widgets), which I believe would be treated
> as libraries just like any GTK+ widget.

I was thinking about a simple UI program... if you have libraries going there it
might change... I would settle for the license the majority decides for the UIL.

> So, you're saying that
> 
>     Any licensed PL + GPL'd .so + non-GPL'd .so = Illegal linking

Yes, if you plus(+) sign actually means linking in the GPL-sense. What I am
unsure about is that dlopen-ing a library explicitly is considered linking by
teh GPL.

> Can you give me an example of a non-GPL'd .so that you might want to use?

Well, you could have a node that links with the matlab library to do some stuff.
Some nodes could link to other OSS libraries that are not GPL-compatible (apache
license, artistic, old-style BSD, ...). Or there could be vendors that supply
closed-source nodes, just like you can have closed-source drivers in Linux. I
see the PL as a language, so you could compare it to gcc. The gcc license
doesn't say "you cannot use gcc to link programs with closed-source libraries".

> Of course, this is not the same issue as wrapping a pre-existing program to
> run as a node.  I think we can consider that to NOT be linking as defined by
> the GPL.  That's what I've been talking about regarding license modifications.

Wraping an executable is definitly not linking, so it's OK with any license we
use.

	Jean-Marc

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




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