In the list of discussion about the WDOSX DOS extender, this interesting question has been raised. It is about legal issues with the LGPL license and the linkage to propietary code. As FreePascal has been directly mentioned, and I am subscribed to both lists, and quite interested in the topic, I thought it would worth to post this item here, to see what people has to say about it. The next forward contains quite a good summary of what has been happening after the announcement that WDOSX developers may be thinking of distributing WDOSX under the LGPL license.
Aitor
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I noticed that if you go to the FreePascal project at http://www.freepascal.org/ and go down to the Licence section at the bottom of the page it says "The packages and runtime library come under a modified Library GNU Public License (LGPL) to allow the use of static libraries when creating applications."
This may be worth investigating because it seems that the static linking of the WDOSX code described below is the primary sticking point that has been raised in this topic.
Cheers
Garry Wood.
"Alain M." wrote:
> 2) distribute my proprietary sw in .OBJ form and have all
> LGPL sw with source included so that they can be rebuilt and
> liked by the user (at his own risc). This cannot be as some libs are
> forbidden to be distributed if not linked with an executable.
> > If WDOSX could be distributed embeded in my binaries,
> I could make a .EXE that has all my proprietary code plus
> the restricted libraries and place all LGLP sw in DLLs
> and then I could be ok with every licence.
> > I hope this explains my problem (and other's I believe).
> I am bringing this discussion because I have tested WDOSX
> with good results and I like it.
Alain,
I think you have a serious point here. My guess is that you are
referring to LPGL Section 6.
The idea behind this section is to enable the user to completely
rebuild the executable using a modified version of the "library".
For anything that does not make use of the Win32 emulation this
can be achieved by simply running stubit.exe on the executable again.
As far as WDLs, however, there currently is no mechanism to replace
them with updated modules once they are part of the executable.
I can see a possible solution for this. However, it requires some
work: Stubit.exe needs to be modified such that it replaces any
WFSE module in the executable where it finds a matching new .WDL
for it and leave all the others alone. Guess that would (be) work...
Guess LGPL wasn't especially written with DOS extenders in mind :-/
I'm going to throw this subject into discussion as I might have
missed something very obvious and easy which might make this issue
a non non- issue...
Best regards,
Michael Tippach
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