Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: GPL compatibility

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:9/9/2000; 9:32:14 AM
Topic:Guido and Richard
Msg #:21064 (In response to 21035)
Prev/Next:21063 / 21065

FWIW, I ran headlong into this in trying to help the E Programming Language team get a bit closer to having a compiler (as opposed to an interpreter). Since Kernel-E is very close, semantically, to Scheme but is written in Java, I suggested that they use the Kawa project's gnu.bytecode and gnu.expr packages to ease the compiler's development.

Sure enough, E is under the MPL and gnu.bytecode and gnu.expr were under the GPL, so they weren't "link-compatible," to use Mark Miller's phrase. It seemed kind of goofy to me, although I was well aware of the problematic aspects of the GPL—E, AFAIK, always expects to ship source anyway.

Regardless, the E team wouldn't move (and rightly so, I think), so I thought, well, I doubt Per Bothner wanted his libraries not to be used, so I e-mailed him about the issue, and he was kind enough to change gnu.bytecode and gnu.expr's licenses to a modified GPL that rather strongly resembles the LGPL and is MPL-compatible. All the lawyers were happy, Per is happy, Mark Miller is happy, so I'm happy.

But why was such a conversation necessary in the first place?

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