Hi Jimmie,
Dr. Geo is distributed under the GPL and shipped with Pharo.
As Pharo is MIT, you can redistribute your whole software under the
license you want, proprietary or free software ones as GPL.
Regarding porting GPL software, I guess you mean rewriting with
Smalltalk, you should be free to license it as you want, for example as
MIT. AFAIK there is no evil restriction as "seen the code" under the GPL.
For library, alternative is LGPL and I read this interesting note:
One should note that subclassing a Java (or other OO) class licensed
under the LGPL is regarded as a use of an interface of a library
comparable to a function call of a library. It is not regarded as a
modification of the original class. Therefore the subclass does not
fall under the requirements of the LGPL.
So using a LGPL library, even extending it, does not force the user to
be in the GPL family license.
The only restriction is the receiver should be capable to update the
LGPL package independently of the application using the package.
Anyway, I don't think you should worried about porting GPL/LGPL
libraries as long as your are rewriting it. You can license it under
MIT. Then LGPL is also possible.
--
Dr. Geo
http://drgeo.eu
