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> 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