[squeak-dev] Re: Swazoo - LGPL or MIT?
Paolo Bonzini
bonzini at gnu.org
Sun Mar 23 07:31:41 UTC 2008
> Right, but the point is the behavior, not the specific license. CLISP
> was barely using readline (just an unnecessary dress up of the UI) and
> even after the maintainer offered to repackage CLISP not to use it,
> RMS still wanted CLISP to be GPL'ed because it *could* be used with
> readline.
Actually, I do believe that he had no right to do so. But there are
many things to consider:
1) at the time, the GPL was very new (1991) and a precedent of its
validity was badly needed;
2) the LGPL did not even exist; the LGPLv3 instead explicitly talks
about subclassing, saying that it does not consitute creating a
derivative work.
3) even the legal precedents for reverse-engineering of interfaces were
not well established. Today there are readline implementations under
BSD license, and RMS never went against them.
Paolo
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