Hello, ... 1st, i want to say that i am not subscribed to debian-legal, and as such, it would be nice if you CC any answer to me.
Ok, now i am asking about advice and clarification, i seem to remember things from reading mail about this subject, some year or two ago, but it is none too fresh for me. Ok, i package the ocaml package, which contain a toplevel ocaml interpretor named ocaml. you can check it by installing the ocaml package and then launching the ocaml toplevel program. Now, the command line interface is rather primitive, and not well behaved. It would be rather nice to be linking it to libreadline. But, then the libreadline is under the GPL, and the ocaml toplevel is released under part LGPL and part QPL, the exact files needed to build the toplevel is under the QPL, and some runtime part that are linked to is under the LGPL. This causes no problem, because the QPL is not incompatible with the LGPL, but it is with the GPL. So there is no possibility to link it with libreadline, isn't it ? Now i remember some discution from some time ago, or maybe even a web page on the FSF site, not sure, that was talking about programs that provide build time configuration options to GPLed libraries, but where this options are disabled by default. Is it ok to do such a thing ? What exactly are the consequence of it. As i see it, every user could then build from source the package with libreadline support, and use it for himself, but not redistribute it. Any distribution of the package would have to be with libreadline support disabled, or else be in source only format (making it non-free). What about a scheme that enables the libreadline support at runtime, only if is specifically stated in a command line argument ? I don't think it will be permitted either. To make matters worse, ocaml is not supporting dynamic linking yet. Any insight on this that i could forward to the upstream authors to request such a feature or not ? Friendly, Sven Luther
