GPL with the Classpath exception - clarification needed

[Lawrence Rosen]

John Cowan reminded us of some GPL history:
> GPL plus an exception for proprietary linking has been around since at
> least the mid-90s under various names, often "the license of Guile", 
> though Guile itself is now under the LGPL.


Oh the irony. 

Definitions of "guile":
1. shrewdness as demonstrated by being skilled in deception
2. the quality of being crafty
3. the use of tricks to deceive someone (usually to extract money from them)

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/


/Larry



> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan at ccil.org]
> Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 10:44 AM
> To: Lawrence Rosen
> Cc: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: GPL with the Classpath exception - clarification needed
> 
> Lawrence Rosen scripsit:
> 
> > And
> > almost none of the technical distinctions being drawn here, interesting
> > though they are to a former programmer like me, are actually reflected
> in
> > the words of the license itself.
> 
> Inevitably so, since they result from the combination of the license
> requirements,
> the technical details of particular languages, and the social practices
> around
> releases.  If people routinely released their C programs as tarballs of
> object
> files and expected end users to link them, the LGPL and GPL+CP would be in
> effect
> equivalent (modulo certain special cases).
> 
> > Why "yet another license" (GPL+Classpath) when OSL 3.0 already handles
> this
> > case correctly under copyright law?
> 
> GPL plus an exception for proprietary linking has been around since at
> least
> the mid-90s under various names, often "the license of Guile", though
> Guile
> itself is now under the LGPL.
> 
> --
> Do I contradict myself?                         John Cowan
> Very well then, I contradict myself.            cowan at ccil.org
> I am large, I contain multitudes.               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
>         --Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass