Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of The GOSSIP Simulation Environment

[Marius Vollmer]

Loic Dachary <address@hidden> writes:

>  > If you think there are problems with the exception, I will consider
>  > removing it.  I'm unsure myself whether it is _really_ a good idea.
> 
>       The exception is working for the header file only and this does
> not achieve what you described.

Is it completely without effect, or does it achieve something, but not
what I want?  What does the exception achieve?

The technical setup is like this: GOSSIP consists of Scheme code that
is loaded into a Guile interpreter, plus a shared library
"libguile-gossip" that is dynamically linked at run-time to the Guile
interpreter.  In turn, this library dynamically loads at run-time
additional shared libraries which implement the `primitive blocks' of
a simulation.

I don't want these `primitive block libraries' to be covered by the
GPL, even so they link to libguile-gossip which is distributed under
the GPL.  Linking to libguile-gossip would make the block libraries
derived works, in my understanding.

In general, I want to make code that builds on libguile-gossip to be
covered by the GPL.  I want to exempt the specific API used to program
block libraries from this, however.  This API is specified in the
header file.

So what I want to say is that when your _only_ contact with GOSSIP is
by including this one header file and using the facilities defined
therein, your code will not be covered by the GPL.

> From your description it seems that LGPL would better fit your
> needs. Is there a specific problem with the LGPL that you want to
> avoid ?

The problem would be that libguile-gossip could then be used with
non-free programs, which I don't want.

>       I won't discuss or question your licence choice beyond the
> legal viability. You already guessed I'm in favor of GPL'ed libraries
> but I'm not trying to convince you on this point.

I'm in favor of GPL, too, that's why I'm trying to use the "GPL with
exception" technique.  If this causes legal problems, I'll use the
pure GPL instead, and require people to distribute their models with
GPL terms.  This wont likely make any difference since not many people
are GOSSIP anyway.  Yet.  ;)