On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Fergus Henderson wrote:

> > Also, I still must permit users to reverse engineer my application.
>
> Yes, that's correct.  You must give users the legal permission to reverse
> engineer your application.  However, you are under no obligation to make
> it easy.

Okay, true enough. There is some loss of legal action a company can take,
but it is probably fine.

> For C code, you can through various techniques (such as `ld -r'
> and the `--retain-symbols-file' options of GNU ld) link your object
> files into a single object file and strip out all of the symbols except
> those undefined symbols that refer to the LGPL'd library or libraries
> that you are linking with.  These techniques can also be used with other
> programming language implementations that generate standard object files,
> such as (my favourite example ;) Mercury.
>
> I don't know if this is possible for Ocaml code, but if it is not, then
> I think it might perhaps be more useful to ask for similar technical
> features, rather than complaining about the license.

There are many ways to address the issue and this could be good
functionality to have. However, it's a lot less work to change the license
and let developers simply strip the binaries after compilation.

I brought up the topic of licensing as a status update. Xavier has said in
the past that the conditions in the LGPL are silly and I agree with him.
He also indicated that they would be looking into modifications in the
future. My intent was not to start a flamewar on license issues, although
they can be very hard to avoid with such a topic!

Patrick

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