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

[Claus Brod]

Oliver,

first things first: I'd rather the ECL community spend their time and
energy on advancing the code, rather than fighting political battles.
Also, I'm glad that ECL uses the LGPL license, rather than GPL,
because otherwise it would lose most of its practical appeal to me.

>> but for example see
>
> http://linuxgazette.net/issue38/kidd.html
>
> or (newer)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readline
>
> Both sources say what I said: You can use readline like gcc.

The first source seems to speculate that MAYBE you could win the legal
battle, IF the author's assumptions are correct and IF you have the
money to pay a lawyer and IF that lawyer is clever and savvy enough
about copyrights, the GPL in particular, and knows what the
differences are between static linking, dynamic linking, and external
invocation. (Good luck with that :-D )

The copyright discussion in the Wikipedia article is mostly a rehash
of the Stallman/Haible exchange. I don't really see where the
Wikipedia article says that you can link in readline and still stick
with a non-GPL license.

But then, maybe we don't have to fight this battle. A potential line
of compromise is to provide a build option which allows end-users to
*optionally* link in readline on their systems if, for some reason,
tools like rlwrap are not sufficient. By default, ECL would continue
to build without readline support, and that would allow it to remain
LGPLed.

  Claus