[kwlug-disc] Switch license or keep it the same?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 4:33 PM, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc
<kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> wrote:
>
> Licenses are so weird.

Indeed ...

> In the C/C++ context, I thought that linking to a GPLed library means
> your code has to be GPL as well. That is (I thought) why the LGPL
> exists -- so that a program that is not GPLed can link to a library
> that is without having to be GPL itself.

The FSF insists on interpreting the GPL as 'running in the same process space'.
Which means that if you link to a library, that library has to be GPL
or LGPL (which
they reluctantly introduced for such cases).

This comes from the days where everything was .a (statically linked)
and .so (dynamically
linked) was fairly new, and they realized that vendors would lock
crucial parts in .so
libraries, so they interpreted things as : "run in the same process space".

The official way around that is interprocess communication between a
GPL process and
a non-GPL one.

I ran into that interpretation with Drupal modules, although a) they are written
in a language that is not compiled (i.e. source required to install
and run them),
and b) they are extensions, and not essential for Drupal itself to run.

I tried to explain all that to them. They still insisted that
everything should be GPL,
which points to a dogmatic stance rather than a technical or rational
explanation.

Wordpress still allows non-GPL extensions, though it runs PHP the same
as Drupal.

Meanwhile, things changed within the Drupal project, so it became a moot point.

> When I use a GPLed module in Python it is different?

Judging from their stance on PHP, yes, Python would be the same (in
FSF's stance,
not a pragmatic one).