On Jun 25, 2007, at 1:58 AM, Rick Widmer wrote:
I think it would because QmailAdmin includes vpopmail code at the
linker level which requires it to be under the GPL license too.
Late linking with .so files is acceptable, because the product does
not include GPL code, and only links to an existing copy at run
time. That effect is why he wants the vpopmail library to be under
LGPL, but it is not.
Vpopmail does make .so files now, but there are configuration
options that change the library interface. If Bert can dictate to
the customer what vpopmail ./configure options to use it should
work. If various customers demand different settings he may need
to compile a different version of his program for each. I don't
know what options are safe to change and what will be a problem.
Perhaps Bert could contribute to vpopmail to make it a dynamically
linked library (.a instead of .so?), and to work in a way where
programs like QmailAdmin don't need to pull information from
Vpopmail's config.h file in order to compile correctly.
I'd really like to see that in vpopmail's future, so it would
theoretically be possible to upgrade vpopmail without having to
recompile qmailadmin, qmail-smtpd (for the chkuser patch) and
whatever other apps have a statically linked vpopmail in them.
Of course, if the company Bert is working for is just going to use
this software internally, then he might be OK as well (again,
IANAL). I thought GPL only came into play when you sold and/or
distributed binaries to other people.
--
Tom Collins - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Vpopmail - virtual domains for qmail: http://vpopmail.sf.net/
QmailAdmin - web interface for Vpopmail: http://qmailadmin.sf.net/
