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Re: guile+readline


> This is not terribly relevant to a pure guile interpreter.  But it
> might affect people using guile in proprietary applications --- do
> they have to worry about whether some user is going to do (use-modules
> (gnu readline)) and then sue them?

Since it's possible to link just about anything in this way
(as we have been discussing) then it's ridiculous for a distributer
of an application to have to take responsibility for the licences of
every OTHER bit of software on a user's system. This is like buying
a commercial version of the bourne shell and then being told that
you can't run software from any other supplier from that shell.

However, if the readline library comes ready compiled and bundled in with
the distribution and the instructions say, ``if you want line editing
then ...'' this is a bit of a different case and considerably
closer to a derived work (IMHO anyhow). I'm yet to see any court
case where this has really been put to the test but I'm guessing
that most people on this list actually support the FSF anyhow so
it shouldn't get as far as a court case.

It seems to me that the spirit of the GNU project partly to
produce free software and partly to encourage people to follow
open standards and make it difficult for any single vendor to
lock users into a single supply for their software. In keeping
with this spirit, I'd say the best method of distribution would
be to build your propriety software as a complete bundle without
guile and supply accurate specifications as to the interface of
that bundle (dynamic, static or whatever you choose so long as it's
documented). Then I'd supply a version of guile that is suitable
for linking into my propriety bundle and I'd distribute this in
source code form including source to all the wrappers and such
required to make it link.

This way if someone likes the guile part of your efforts but
doesn't like your propriety software, they can cleanly take
away the public offerings and possibly replace the propriety
part with an alternative. This approach suits my sense of what is
good for the user and doesn't attempt to enforce any monopolistic
practice.

Anyone agree?

	- Tel