[m-users.] Does Mercury's license GPL-2 not include class-path exception?

mucaho mucaho at gmail.com
Sun Oct 4 10:48:02 AEDT 2020


My apologies, after some more research I found out there are two licenses:
The LGPLv2 covers the "standard" library and the GPLv2 covers the compiler
and co.
Thus it is "safe" to link to the "standard" library during runtime, without
having to share your code under larger work of the LGPLv2.

Cheers

On Sun, 4 Oct 2020 at 00:27, mucaho <mucaho at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings
>
>
> I have recently posted about a demo project I implemented in Mercury (
> http://lists.mercurylang.org/archives/users/2020-October/008915.html),
> as seen there licensed under the MPLv2.
>
> Recently a kind gentleman has followed up on my mail, being interested in
> additional material related to it.
> This gentleman has introduced himself and briefly talked about his
> interests and what he did during his work life.
> I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a fellow practitioner also using
> Mercury!
>
> One of the areas of work was patent law, which didn't surprise me at first.
> However, after some time it got me thinking and thought briefly about
> whether I correctly stated all references,
> gave credit where credit is due, etc. whether I behaved ethically correct
> in regards to publications and so on,
> which every academic should do of course.
>
> However, another thought came to mind and I thought about the license of
> my project.
> I have deliberately chosen a license which would promote sharing of
> modifications that could prove useful to the general public,
> while not being too restrictive, hence why I licensed the demo project
> under MPLv2.
>
> Most of my other open-source projects have been developed in Java, which
> is licensed using the GPLv2 with the classpath exception
> (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception#The_Classpath_exception),
> which I assumed was true also for Mercury.
> The freedom of licensing your source code however you want, is what I
> fundamentally assume(d) is true for every programming language in the world!
> However, after checking Mercury's GPLv2 License there was no such
> exception.
>
> Am I being paranoid here, did I misunderstand the license, or did I
> inadvertently cause copyright infringement?
> Should my demo project's license be actually Mercury's license?
>
> I'm usually very pedantic and correct when it comes to "these" kinds of
> things, but am currently very dumbfounded and certainly not an expert,
>
> I would appreciate any help / answer you could give me
> (Also apologies to the gentleman for describing the specifics of our
> conversation, I hope you don't mind, it just illustrates my thinking
> process).
> (Furthermore, I think the answer to this question could maybe prove useful
> for other people who search for it too)
>
>
> Kind regards
> mucaho
>
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