[fpc-devel]RTL license issue?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Matti Hamalainen wrote:

> 
> 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;