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OSBC: Life at the edge of the GPLOSBC: Life at the edge of the GPLPosted Apr 2, 2009 5:24 UTC (Thu) by jeffnorman (guest, #57684)Parent article: OSBC: Life at the edge of the GPL I wanted to note that the FSF has just released an exception (the first?) to GPL3 under Section 7 (that allows "additional permissions" to negate other terms of the GPL3) that is quite interesting in this context. If a copyright owner chooses to apply the exception to his or her own library, the exception would permit a work that uses such library to link to the library and distribute the resulting object code (including the library) under a proprietary license. Interestingly, the effect of the amendment is to maintain full reciprocity at the source code and intermediate code level, but (at least potentially) remove reciprocity at the object code level. The exception is here. While the FSF clearly intends to apply this exception clause only to certain GCC libraries, it will be interesting to see if it is more widely adopted (as the LGPL become the de facto standard for libraries, so too could this).
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OSBC: Life at the edge of the GPL Posted Apr 2, 2009 16:33 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] The language you point to is a modification to the old terms that apply to libgcc and libstdc++, which have always been licensed roughly this way, to allow proprietary applications to link with them in a way that is even more permissive than the LGPL. The intent is to use it only for essential language support routines.
OSBC: Life at the edge of the GPL Posted Apr 2, 2009 18:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I've certainly never heard of the libgcc exception being picked up by
anything that wasn't a language support library. It's possible, I suppose, especially now that more attention has been drawn to this particular obscure corner. But I'm not really sure it's *likely*.
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