License Committee Report for September 2009

[Bruce Perens]

Will Robertson wrote:
> So if you wish to embed Falcon into a binary rather than just link to 
> it, your work essentially becomes open source.
In the one or two decades that we had the LGPL and did not have such 
easy use of shared libraries, the users of LGPL software in commercial 
applications provided a re-linkable form of their proprietary 
executables to users, what C programmers call a ".o file". The only 
difference that run-time linking makes is that you don't have to take 
this step any longer for your executable to be compliant with LGPL.
> 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.
No, this is just engineering that you haven't yet been educated about yet.
>  - If Falcon has BSD,  then Falcon can be used and abused without 
> restriction by the proprietary software.
>  - If Falcon has LGPL, then the software must be unduly opened up.
>  - If Falcon has FPLL, then the software can stay closed but must 
> reference Falcon.
Not valid, for reasons given above.

    Thanks

    Bruce