Re: [Chicken-users] German Lisp Workshop at the CCC in Cologne

[John Cowan]

Moritz Heidkamp scripsit:

> One thing almost
> every participant wondered about was that csi didn't provide readline
> support out of the box. 

The answer is that supplying readline by default would require csi to
be released under the GPL.  There are two ways around this problem that
I can think of:

1) We could use editline (aka libedit) by default rather than readline.

2) We could supply two versions of the csi main program, one with
readline support under the GPL, and one without under the BSD.  This is
what Pure <http://pure-lang.googlecode.com> does.  It has to be done by
the copyright holder, because a licensee can't just remove the feature
from a program that requires it to be under the GPL and make it not GPL
any more, but the licensor can violate their own license if they want.

-- 
John Cowan   <address@hidden>   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
One time I called in to the central system and started working on a big
thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing script.  One of the geologists
came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that happens to me too.
Try hanging up and phoning in again.'  --Beverly Erlebacher