Re: Questions

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 10:47:17AM +0000, Sander Vesik was heard to remark:
> On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >   Instead of fighting over the way one qualifies licences, I think there
> > is a productive debate to have in that domain w.r.t. Bonobo. While there
> > is no incentive in the project to try to change the LGPL or similar rule
> > for the libraries in the platform, Bonobo components are a different kind
> > of libraries. While they can be linked with the application using the
> > linker when building binaries, they can also be selected dynamically
> > *upon user demand* to provide some capabilities of the program. Like for

'dynamically upon demand' isn't a good criteria, in part because there
are/have been versions of 'ld' that can relink a static program on 
demand.  (At least, some versions of ld allow your to do this, although
you do need to have a library that hasn't been stripped of symbols. 
e.g. on AIX, you can 'ld -o my_sh whaked.o /bin/sh'  to create
a binary called my_sh that is bin/sh but relinked to use a differnt .o)

When you can dynamically relink statically linked programs, then this
line gets murky.


> >    - should the GNOME project requires that Bonobo components be released
> >      under the LGPL to be part of the platform (I tend to think so)
> 
> It would probably make a lot of things easier and thus be a worthwhile
> thing to do. At least IMVHO.

Bill & the gpl faq hit this on the head --- 

The library side needs to be LGPL'ed.  The server side can be anything,
as long as its a different process/address space.

There used to be some orbit stunt that could avoid the process switch,
and stay in the same address space, but I think that died....

> >    - how do we deal with licence compatibility between the applications
> >      and the Bonobo components.
> > 
> >   An interesting example would be a closed source application with a 
> > built-in bonobo component to render HTML pages, but allowing the user
> > to pick up his component of choice to render them in a preferred way
> > (like Nautilus does). If there is an HTML bonobo component provided in
> > the user's desktop but released under the GPL, would the user selecting
> > that component for use in this application a Licence infrigement ? 

Yes. You 'd need the library side to be LGPL'ed to be able to answer
'no'.   Interesting question though: who infiringed, the guy who wrote
the code to allow dynamic linking to GPL'ed libraries, or the guy who 
ran the program and caused it to load?

> > If yes
> > how would the user know ? And how should this issue be handled in practice
> > without making this a nightmare for the users ?

This is a strong argument for requirnig the client side of the bonobo
compnenent to be LGPL'ed, just to avoid the confusion.

--linas

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