Re: Shared Libraries and naming conventions
Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 19:10:54 +0100 (BST)
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
It seems only libio/*.c has the virus, but thats a fair chunk of the stdio
code to clean up. I've asked rms if he considers the license that favours
GNU GPL over non GNU GPL code fair 8)
This is precisely why I've said for a while now that turning over
copyright to the FSF may not be the brightest idea in the book; remember
that rms has a political agenda that doesn't always line up with what's
best for the Linux community!
It might be interesting to consider whether or not it makes sense to
start up up an effort to create a truly free Linux libc which is
independent of the FSF, and doesn't have this kind of license
contamination. A requirement of that such an effort would be that all
parts of the code *must* be under LGPL or X-Consortium style copyright.
Having GPL'ed code in the library, such as the libio code, would be
expressly prohibited.
Initially such a project should strive to be binary compatible with
glibc, but if glibc folks start making incompatible changes, I'd also
recommand that such an effort make a much stronger effort to maintain
binary compatibility than the glibc folks have occasionally shown in the
past.
In the long term, having such a contaminated code as is in glibc 2.1
would really hurt the interests of the Linux community, IMO. It may be
that at some point in the future someone comes up with a better compiler
than GCC. Ironically, if the egcs folks sit on the *ss and stangnate
like the old GCC 2.x developers did, a replacement GPL'ed compiler would
still get scrwed by the glibc license. This is bad; very bad. And if
the glibc folks aren't willing to change their license, we may want to
seriously consider moving away from using glibc.
- Ted
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