Re: [ANNOUNCE] XML/Ada 0.5 released

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>]

David Starner wrote
>The FSF doesn't agree; in their opinion, a lot of the technical
>arguments are moot, as what will rule the day in court is the legal
>arguments. And in their opinion, linking is linking, and will be
>treated the same in court.

That would depend on you loading/linking the entire library. If you on the
other hand do this under program control (like it is common in VMS) they
will have problems, especially if the library in question is one of many.

A common technique in VMS is to load e.g. policy libraries at runtime. That
means that the people developing the libraries does it against a
specification. If you GPL your library, it does not infect the main program.
One thing I really miss in Ada is a common way of linking routines etc in a
dll at runtime (on a general computer). That would be a very powerful
feature.


>In general, most people who use GPL for libaries intend for it work
>the way the FSF says it works. Taking your approach with someone else's
>library without their permission may find you in court, or at least
>the target of a lot of pissed-off free software people.

That may well be the case.

Greetings,