On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 11:42:24PM -0500, David B. Held wrote:
"Stefan Seefeld" <seefeld@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:40BEA50C.1050003@sympatico.ca...
[...] They certainly allow proprietary software to use GSL. What they don't want is people extending their work (and that's how they would look at a boost wrapper) be able to distribute that work under less free terms than what GPL provides (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
Note that the operative term here is 'distribute', not 'use'. If you don't distribute you don't need to look into license issues. [...]
So are you saying that Boost could produce a GSL wrapper, distribute it independently, and ask users to obtain GSL themselves?
Yes. A wrapper around GSL would not violate the licence, although it might have to be written from within the European Union. EU law says that the public interface (i.e. the header files and the prototypes they contain) are not protected by copyright law, so you can read the headers and write code that uses the interface without having to comply to the licence terms. This is from http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Open_source_copyright_law.html: The rationale is that the header contains only information about the access points to the routines, and provides no information on the inner workings of the software. This allows open source developers to recreate a compatible version of any library or component for which a header file is available. This applies equally to commercial libraries and to copylefted (GPL) ones. There was a discussion about this on advogato.org recently, but that site's down so here's the google cache version: http://tinyurl.com/2hmx2 jon -- "The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." - H.L. Mencken