Re:Twenty questions about the GPL
by DarkShikari on Monday July 13, 2009 @05:19PM
(#702509)
At one point he said he'd distribute a working program without readline or readline support even enabled by default and leave it up to the user to configure it. It was only going to have an interface to readline without including any readline code. He was told he couldn't even do that.
Then RMS was wrong. The SFLC says you're quite allowed to do that, a classic example being ffmpeg, which can be LGPL, GPL, or even non-redistributable depending on what external libraries you link it to on compile-time.
People have to learn that RMS is not God and that just because he says something about the GPL doesn't mean that the lawyers agree.
That's not true. If you read the story you'll see that the guy had a working program for years before he used readline. The use of readline only improved an already working program. Not to mention, the program in question was a language implementation and readline had nothing to do with it. It was a user interface perk.
At one point he said he'd distribute a working program without readline or readline support even enabled by default and leave it up to the user to configure it. It was only going to have an interface to readline without including any readline code. He was told he couldn't even do that.
In the end he chose to GPL the entire language implementation. To him, it probably didn't make a difference what the license was and it was easier than replacing readline. Personally, I would have replaced it with a BSD-licensed alternative just out of spite given the way the whole thing was approached. The line about how a judge wouldn't be convinced the program didn't violate the GPL read like a thinly veiled threat to me.