GPLv3: a first look [LWN.net]

GPLv3: a first look

Posted Jan 16, 2006 19:22 UTC (Mon) by bjlucier (subscriber, #5281)
Parent article: GPLv3: a first look

Some parts of the Lisp community have sensed the need to add clauses to the LGPL to make it more Lisp friendly, see the Lisp Lesser General Public Licence. I hope that, as computer languages adopt more of the dynamic features of members of the Lisp and Smalltalk language families, the [[L]L]GPL can be adapted to allay the concerns of some members of these communities.

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GPLv3: a first look

Posted Jan 19, 2006 14:06 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

OCaml too. See the special exception at the top of:

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/old_caml_site/ocaml/LICENSE.html

The original LGPL says something to the effect that if you use
an LGPL library within your proprietary binary, then you must
provide an object code version of the same binary which can be
relinked against a newer version of the LGPL library. (Nothing
to do with revealing the source though).

But OCaml has type-safe linking which means that object files
provided like this would be essentially useless. Any, even minor,
change to the interface to the LGPL library would mean that
linking would fail. So this clause is usually omitted from
LGPL OCaml libraries.

Rich.

LGPL derivatives

Posted Jan 20, 2006 20:01 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (subscriber, #4593) [Link]

We also applied something like this to fltk (http://www.fltk.org/COPYING.php). Even in C++, supplying object files that can be relinked with the library is enormously hard to do and probably completely useless to anybody who wants to modify the library. It would be far easier for the user to tell the original author "can you please put this useful patch for fltk into the version you are using and send me a new compilation of the program". Also some claim that this requires dynamic linking, which would completley kill the main advantage of fltk, which is that programs using it don't have to be "installed" and the executable "just works".

In our version we tried to make it clear that modifying the fltk code itself and using that in your program requires you to give out the source code for your modifications.

As I have seen this done dozens of times, now including the Lisp and OCaml versions, I would really like to see a single *official* LGPL3 which rewrites or removes these "must supply linkable object code" restrictions. It is obvious that huge numbers of library implementors want to modify the library like this, and without an official version it is leading to huge numbers of slightly different, and possibly incompatable, licenses.