[fpc-pascal][Fwd: Re: [wdosx] Future of WDOSX]

[Aitor Santamaría]

Hi,

In the list of discussion about the WDOSX DOS extender, this interesting 
question has been raised. It is about legal issues with the LGPL license 
and the linkage to propietary code. As FreePascal has been directly 
mentioned, and I am subscribed to both lists, and quite interested in 
the topic, I thought it would worth to post this item here, to see what 
people has to say about it. The next forward contains quite a good 
summary of what has been happening after the announcement that WDOSX 
developers may be thinking of distributing WDOSX under the LGPL license.

Aitor
=====

I noticed that if you go to the FreePascal project at http://www.freepascal.org/ and go down 
to the Licence section at the bottom of the page it says "The packages and runtime library 
come under a modified Library GNU Public License (LGPL) to allow  the use of static 
libraries when creating applications."

This may be worth investigating because it seems that the static linking of the WDOSX 
code described below is the primary sticking point that has been raised in this topic.

Cheers

Garry Wood.

> "Alain M." wrote:
> 
> > 2) distribute my proprietary sw in .OBJ form and have all
> > LGPL sw with source included so that they can be rebuilt and
> > liked by the user (at his own risc). This cannot be as some libs are
> > forbidden to be distributed if not linked with an executable.
> > 
> > If WDOSX could be distributed embeded in my binaries,
> > I could make a .EXE that has all my proprietary code plus
> > the restricted libraries and place all LGLP sw in DLLs
> > and then I could be ok with every licence.
> > 
> > I hope this explains my problem (and other's I believe).
> > I am bringing this discussion because I have tested WDOSX
> > with good results and I like it.
> 
> Alain,
> 
> I think you have a serious point here. My guess is that you are
> referring to LPGL Section 6.
> 
> The idea behind this section is to enable the user to completely
> rebuild the executable using a modified version of the "library".
> 
> For anything that does not make use of the Win32 emulation this
> can be achieved by simply running stubit.exe on the executable again.
> As far as WDLs, however, there currently is no mechanism to replace
> them with updated modules once they are part of the executable.
> I can see a possible solution for this. However, it requires some
> work: Stubit.exe needs to be modified such that it replaces any
> WFSE module in the executable where it finds a matching new .WDL
> for it and leave all the others alone. Guess that would (be) work...
> 
> Guess LGPL wasn't especially written with DOS extenders in mind :-/
> 
> I'm going to throw this subject into discussion as I might have
> missed something very obvious and easy which might make this issue
> a non non- issue...
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> 
> Michael Tippach
>