Ah, this can of worms. My first question - does he want your utilities
to act in the capacity of providing a service to his program, like a
library? Or is he asking if loading it into the lisp image, even if
there is no communication between the two, constitutes a GPL violation?
I'm assuming the former, but the way it's asked it's not completely
clear. And then there are fuzzy issues, like what if all your
utilities do is generate a list of numbers, which are then used by his
program? This can be achieved in many ways not involving libraries -
we talk to gnuplot without treating it as a library for example. How
do we define this? It's hard.
Of course, you are always free to release a version of your graph
utilities under a different license, since you hold the copyright on
your own code. If he agrees to release any changes he makes on your
utilities back to you so you can include them in the GPL version,
everyone's happy. As for our code, any utilities in Maxima written
before the current group of maintainers (and hence not under copyright
by someone on the list) is constrained by the terms of the original DOE
release, so we cannot change the license of the originally included
code without more trouble than I care to think about. Will Schelter I
believe was in a position to choose the license, but we are not.
If you are asking if we can allow lgpl code to be included in the
Maxima tarball, personally I don't see a problem with that, so long as
the header of the file clearly identifies it with all the proper
information. Personally I think we should make sure all the files have
a proper header describing their status as a matter of policy.
CY
--- Martin RUBEY <rubey@labri.fr> wrote:
> Hi you all,
>
> I just got a mail of somebody interested in my graph utilities,
> asking:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Do you intend that compiling and loading your utilities into the same
> running Lisp as my code means that my code must be GPLed, too?
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> according to the GPL Faq
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL
>
> or
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem
>
> the answer is simply "yes". However, I wonder if it wouldn't be wiser
> to
> release the utilities under the LGPL. I don't think it will be
> possible to
> release his software under the GPL, and I *really* need somebody who
> helps
> me. In any case, the LGPL would be compatible with the maxima
> project.
>
> Martin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
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