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

[Julien Fischer]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2018, Mark Brown wrote:

> 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.

For the extras stuff, if they're something other than LGPL then there
should be a local license file in their own directory.

> 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.

Chances are they were originally in the compiler directory and the
license wasn't updated when they were moved to mdbcomp.  (I would
note that some of those files are included directly in GPL'd components
like the slice tools or deep profiler.)

What sort of clearance do you need?

> 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.

As I mentioned the other day, the situation with the trace library
and GNU readline complicates things for debugging grades as well.
(We will need to document that situation fairly carefully, e.g.
configuring with --without-readline etc.)

I've been looking into supporting the NetBSD editline library as
alternative to readline.

The situation with getopt code potentially being included in the runtime
directory still needs to resolved.

Julien.