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

[Julien Fischer]

Hi Mark,

On Mon, 28 May 2018, Mark Brown wrote:

> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 10:25 AM, Julien Fischer <jfischer at opturion.com> wrote:
>> LGPL with a static linking exception will certainly address the
>> technical issues.  From a non-technical perspective, BSD or MIT,
>> would be more useful when getting Mercury accepted when creating
>> proprietary software.
>
> I agree with that, but can you make such a call without consulting all
> the authors who put the license there in the first place? I think it's
> a lot safer just to allow the distribution of object code, since we
> know already that that was the intent (the topic having come up many
> times over the years).

That's a fair point.

>> 2. runtime/mercury_getopt.[ch] contains a modified copy of the
>> the getopt source code (which IIRC is conditionally compiled in).
>
> Can/should this be swapped out for a freer implementation, such as
> https://github.com/kimgr/getopt_port ?

The alternative would be to get the FSF to relicense their code
(which seems unlikely).

(WRT to the readline issue I mentioned, libeditline should provide
a less restrictive alternative to it.)

Julien.