Re: Ada-WinRT bindings - Alpha release

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Saturday, April 14, 2018 at 9:41:38 AM UTC-5, Simon Wright wrote:
> "Dan'l Miller" writes:
> 
> > Conversely, Mono could conceivably now or in the future trivially
> > utilize some portion of GCC somewhere in its build process of
> > something—anything on which Ada-WinRT is downstream, even indirectly.
> > This could trigger the “any work based on GCC” clause in the Eligible
> > Compilation Process, which would then revert Ada-WinRT's
> > GPL-with-Runtime-Exception license to full-fledged GPL.  This
> > sneak-in-the-backdoor sequence of events years from now is
> > specifically the kind of viralness that is feared from the GPL,
> > including the GPL-with-Runtime-Exceptions.
> 
> You may be right, IANAL, are you? What exactly does "any work based on
> GCC" mean, anyway?

In jurisdictions of the USA where I live (Texas), the plain meaning of the statutory law (and state and federal constitutions) as a sufficiently well-read commonperson would understand the words & phrases & sentences & contexts to mean are what the words & phrases & sentences & contexts mean, unless there exists an ambiguity caused by a misspelled word or an ungrammatical construct in English.  By that standard, the plain meaning as understood by a common person prevails over any contortions by a lawyer.  Hence, no lawyer is needed to read and comprehend the LGPL and GPL, if the reader has completely read those 2 contracts and has read & comprehended USA's copyright law, such as at & near the URL below.

In the USA's copyright law, (unless narrowed by “original” or “derivative”,) “work” is shorthand for ‘an original artifact or a verbatim copy thereof or a derivative copy thereof’ so that that long phrase need not be instantiated over & over again.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

> >                                LGPL forces anyone modifying Alex's
> > Ada-WinRT work to contribute those modifications publicly so that they
> > get back to Alex.
> 
> I don't see that? LGPL looks so complicated that you would need a lawyer
> to be sure.

You don't see it, so let's all see it together.  Under the plain-English meaning of LGPLv3, modification to Ada-WinRT itself would not fall into any of LGPLv3's exceptions of creating a Combined Work (i.e., an application/executable as a linked file on persistent storage and/or as a link-loaded work in RAM).  Here are the steps that give application a right to copy a work (i.e., DLL) derived from a modified source code of Ada-WinRT:
0) Modify Ada-WinRT in some way that the application/executable absolutely needs (e.g., the fix of a severe bug without which application won't work).
1) in LGPLv3: “Use a suitable shared library mechanism for linking with the Library.”  [so that a software-freedom user of the application may install a further-modified variant of Ada-WinRT DLL underneath the application]
2) in LGPLv3: “you may convey a copy of the modified version … under the GNU GPL, with none of the additional permissions of this License applicable to that copy.“ [because without these words, application has no right to copy the modified the derived work (i.e., object code) of the modified Ada-WinRT]
3) in GPLv3: “You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable ••Corresponding Source•• under the terms of this License, in one of these ways: … Convey the object code …, accompanied by … access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.” [which is the must-supply-the-source-code-publicly that Simon Wright was not overtly seeing in the LGPL itself, which is true that these words did not appear in the LGPL itself, because the LGPL evoked these words from the GPL, not unlike calling a subroutine.]
4) Alex downloads that modified source code from that network server (e.g., GitHub).
5) Alex incorporates that fix into the head-end source code of Ada-WinRT.
Q.E.D.

> >                                                              Alex is
> > completely free and unfettered to choose whichever license he thinks
> > best, considering all these ramifications.
> 
> Well, why not MIT then?

Because people who modify Ada-WinRT would not be compelled to release their modifications publicly, inhibiting Alex from merging them into head-end source code of Ada-WinRT.