[m-dev.] [m-users.] Closed source Mercury projects on Windows

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 11:19 AM, Julien Fischer <jfischer at opturion.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 5 Jun 2018, Mark Brown wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 5, 2018 at 11:19 PM, Zoltan Somogyi
>> <zoltan.somogyi at runbox.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 21:39:13 +1000, Mark Brown <mark at mercurylang.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One more thing is that we currently have text at the start of each
>>>> file mentioning the LGPL, which we should also update. Any objections
>>>> to the following wording?
>>>>
>>>> % This file is distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General
>>>> Public License,
>>>> % with the special exception on linking described in the file
>>>> COPYING.LIB.
>>>
>>>
>>> Why not simply
>>>
>>> % This file is distributed under the terms specified in COPYING.LIB.
>>
>>
>> Ok, that's better. Thanks.
>
>
> On a related note, a lot of the libraries in extras also point at that
> file.  That shouldn't be problematic, although as the static linking
> exception won't apply to them we now have situation where some of the
> library bindings have a more restrictive license then the libraries
> they are bindings to (e.g. the cairo binding).

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I wasn't intending to change the
licenses of anything but the core libraries.

I've come across another problem: much of the mdbcomp directory is
actually labelled GPL even though mdbcomp itself is LGPL. I really
can't change these files without clearance, although I imagine they
were always intended to be LGPL given they were in mdbcomp in the
first place.

To avoid unintended captures, rather than change COPYING.LIB I am
going to add COPYING.CORELIB which will contain the special exception
and the LGPL. Then, at least for the time being, I'll just update the
copyright messages for the standard library and runtimes to point to
the new license file, since those libraries are the ones primarily
needed. We can move the debugging libraries over to the CORELIB
license as a separate change, once mdbcomp is sorted out.

Mark