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Mailing lists / fpc-devel / 2001-01

RTL license issue?

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Matti Hamalainen

Yesterday I came to think about the FPC license, especially when concerning the RTL. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand GNU GPL, program linked (statically or dynamically) with a GPL licensed library must itself be 'licensed with a GPL compatible license' which in turn means GPL itself in many cases.

Because FPC's RTL is licensed under GNU GPL, I would understand that _EVERY_ program linked with the RTL (which means practically every program/library compiled with FPC) should be GPL!

There are probably many developers who (unintentionally) break the license as they may assume that the RTL license is more 'relaxed'.

I don't know if it is your specific intention to have it so, but it would be interesting to know the developer-team's opinion.

-

The above 'problem' would be solved if the license was LGPL instead of GPL, also preferably modified to allow static linking without source distribution.

= ccr/TNSP - | http://www.tnsp.org/ =
= Foo is a synonym for Bar, but not vice versa. =

Michael Van Canneyt
to Matti Hamalainen
Matti Hamalainen wrote 22 lines
Yesterday I came to think about the FPC license, especially when concerning the RTL. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand GNU GPL, program linked (statically or dynamically) with a GPL licensed library must itself be 'licensed with a GPL compatible license' which in turn means GPL itself in many cases. Because FPC's RTL is licensed under GNU GPL, I would understand that _EVERY_ program linked with the RTL (which means practically every program/library compiled with FPC) should be GPL! There are probably many developers who (unintentionally) break the license as they may assume that the RTL license is more 'relaxed'. I don't know if it is your specific intention to have it so, but it would be interesting to know the developer-team's opinion. - The above 'problem' would be solved if the license was LGPL instead of GPL, also preferably modified to allow static linking without source distribution.

We were aware of this problem and specially made an exception:

1) RTL is LGPL (Library GPL) and so can be linked dynamically with non-gpl-ed code. Check the file COPYING in the RTL directory.

2) There is explicitly an exception stated in our license that says that static linking with non-GPL programs is allowed.

Just checked: This latter statement has disappeared from COPYING.FPC, it seems !!

To core developers: We'll discuss this on the private list, it must be fixed ASAP.

Michael;