License Committee Report for September 2009

[John Cowan]

Will Robertson scripsit:

> So if you wish to embed Falcon into a binary rather than just link to  
> it, your work essentially becomes open source. As the only example I'm  
> familiar with, take the example of LuaTeX, in which the pdfTeX engine  
> is opened up and grafted together with Lua. (My understanding of the  
> way these embedded languages work only:) This is quite significantly  
> more than just linking to a shared library -- i.e., it would be  
> completely impossible for a user to simply relink a new version of Lua  
> into LuaTeX.

So then you do it the old way, and ship a .a file containing the linkable
object code of the proprietary app, which people can then link with
a new liblua.o.  (In fact Lua *is* available as a .so/.dll from the
LuaBinaries project.)  There is no guarantee, of course, that when a
new version of the embedded language is plugged in that the proprietary
app will continue to work, but the LGPL doesn't require that -- it only
requires that relinking be possible.

-- 
Unless it was by accident that I had            John Cowan
offended someone, I never apologized.           cowan at ccil.org
        --Quentin Crisp                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan