Re: GMGPL vs. LGPL, was: Re: ANN: Update to AdaGPGME and libgpg-error

[Jeff C <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

Tapio Kelloniemi wrote:
> Jeff C <jcreem@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>One note..While I am a big fan of the GMGPL approach, it is not really
>>clear that it is entirely helpful in this case since GNUPG itself
>>appears to be GPL without exception...
> 
> 
> Why do all Ada softwrae use "GMGPL" instead of Lesser General Public
> License? I'm not a lawyer and probably reading the both texts would not make
> me wiser at all.
> 

First insert the old I am not a lawyer thing....but here is my 
understanding.

The problem (or at least one major problem) is that the LGPL is not 
really compatible with generic/template based programming languages.

Section 6 of the LGPL has clauses that require the things that use the 
LGPL library to either be licensed under GPL like terms OR you have to 
distribute the work so that the end user can apply bug fixes to the LGPL 
portion and continue to run. You can do this with plain old C (ignoring 
the trivial stuff like Macros and constants) by doing dynamic linking to 
the library. With C++ Templates and Ada generics you can not usually get 
away with a dynamic link to portions of the library code.

So, GMGPL essentially is another way at getting to an end state similar 
to what people *THink* the LGPL says.