Whow, even Xavier wants to have fun interpreting the GPL.

> > No. Gnu-readline is a well-known example of library released under the
> > GPL, which makes it incompatible with the caml toplevel, which is
> > covered by the QPL :-)
> 
> Waitaminute.  The Caml toplevel doesn't *link* with the Caml runtime
> system and bytecode interpreter -- just like a shell script doesn't link
> with the Bash shell.
> 
> That is, we have a piece of LGPL'd C code (the Caml bytecode
> interpreter and runtime system) that links with whatever C libraries
> happen to be LGPL-compatible and interprets bytecode for a QPL'd
> program (the toplevel) produced by a QPL'd compiler (ocamlc).
> What can possibly be wrong with that?

As long as you distribute the special runtime containing readline
separately from the toplevel, this reasoning is OK. But the first man
making a custom toplevel is dead: having both in the same file won't
do. Even distributing libreadline inside the ocaml distribution might
be a problem: the intent of using readline inside the toplevel is
clear enough that the whole thing can be seen as a whole work (cf
paragraph 2b).

> (Unless a GPL'd library cannot be linked with a LGPL'd program, which
> would be a surprise to me, but you never know with those FSF licenses :-)

I don't know either :-)

Best regards,

     Jacques Garrigue
-------------------
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs  FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr  Archives: http://caml.inria.fr