Re: The Guile license and the use of LGPL libs (like GMP).

[Bill Gribble]

On Tue, 2002-05-28 at 13:28, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Personally, I would be happy to see Guile use the LGPL or even the
> unmodified GPL.  It makes things easier (as shown by this very issue),
> but relicensing towards more restrictions should not be done lightly.
> People have said that they do make use of the exception, and taking
> that choice away from them would be bad.

I use the exception.  Were the guile-1.6 license to become strictly GPL,
I would have to stick with guile-1.4 for my own code. 

I'm not sure exactly what the difference is between the Guile license
currently and the LGPL.  If I could continue to write programs that use
libguile but can have licenses more restrictive than the GPL, I don't
really care which license guile uses. 

> That would not be good.  GMP is the technically Right Thing to use,
> and it would be strange to refuse our 'own' software for its
> restrictive license terms, wouldn't it?

License issues are part of the criteria one has to use to evaluate the
alternatives.  If the licenses of GMP and Guile aren't compatible, it's
not that strange to have to forego use of GMP. 

b.g.