[Ecls-list] success, was: broken local installation of ecl

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov at yandex.ru> wrote:
>> Sorry, but that's nonsense.

No, it is not. Obviously you know very little about the story of free
software, lisp and CLISP in particular. The problem with readline is
real: it is a GPL library, not LGPL. That means any software that
links with a GPL library has to become GPL itself. ECL on the other
hand is LGPL, which allows to link it with proprietary software
including software that is to be sold and closed source.

>> By using gcc (GPL) or readline or
>> whatsoever you do not need to take over the GPL, since it's just a tool.
>> These things are discussed at many places at length, see for example
>> http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html.
>> (Just an example: FreeBSD uses readline.)

FreeBSD is an operating system and it includes readline in components,
but editline was born indeed in the NetBSD community to avoid the
poisoning effect of that license.

>> So, please, say what you really mean, and this open on the project
>> web page: You fight certain forms of open source/ free software, and
>> thus you will not use some software (don't hide behind fake technical argumentation).
>> (I'm not arguing here against political decisions: The point is honesty.)

Come on, do not be cynical. I am not fighting _ANYTHING_ (*). I am
just trying to let ECL survive in a confusing environment. You as
individual user may say whatever, but any visum of a legal problem
scare some people away from certain useful open projects, such as
CLISP. I do not want that to happen with ECL, where we have seen
significant improvements coming indeed from non-hobbyists and
supporting companies

> Take a look, Clisp is GPL'ed exactly because of readline
> http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL

Thanks for the link Anton, I could not find itbefore.

Oliver: take note, this is Richard Stallman himself talking.

 "If you don't change to using the GPL, then you'll have to stop using
readline.  Readline's terms say that the whole program has to be under
the GPL, and just having the user do the link doesn't change this.  If
the program is designed to run with readline as a part, then readline
is a part of it."

Juanjo

(*) I myself have participated in GPL projects where it did not matter
the licensse much, such as porting Autoconf to OS/2, and the rest of
GNU text, file and other toolchains. Add that to a free X-server for
OS/2, porting Doom to the same operating system, two libraries for
numerical programming with Scheme and ML, a sparse matrix library for
Yorick, a GPL numerical environment, ... Shall we continue? So stop
winning that I fight open source projects and that I should state that
in my webpages.

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental
CSIC, Serrano, 113, Madrid 28040 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com