[sent only to debian-legal. Comments are program-independant] Steve Langasek wrote: > Users do not violate the GPL: the GPL does not govern use of a program. > But it would be illegal for Debian to *ship* a version of FireBird > that uses libreadline.
On further research, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#IfLibraryIsGPL seems to imply that linking a program to a GPL library (even for personal use) means the program must be GPL. This seems like a contradiction. > > That is, if all you need are your private headers and stub library, > that's fine -- as long as that's what FireBird uses by default when > installed. If FireBird ships with a Depends: libreadlinex, then > clearly we are linking against libreadline. So would pseudocode like: if ( lib = dl_load("libreadline") ) //Use libreadline code else //Use internal stub lib = dl_load("libreadline_stubs"); be a way around this? Especially if the program only Suggests: libreadline? --Joe
