On Sat, 4 Jul 2020 at 16:20, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl wrote:
Would the maintainer consider switching the whole thing to LGPLv3? This would preserve the freeness of his code and be much less hassle for everyone involved, with no interpretation of new legal texts required.
LGPL has other implications towards proprietary software, and that's what the authors specifically want to protect, so that's a hard line.
I'm not sure what you mean. LGPL keeps the code free but allows it to be freely combined with software under different licenses, which is what we want in this case.
Yeap, but it's more permissive also with the FlexiBLAS interface (the one that enables hooking into the duplicated BLAS/LAPACK interface, the one that BLAS/LAPACK consumers are not using), and this is what the authors do not want.
Wouldn't the Classpath Exception [1] be appropriate here? This wouldn't require the interpretation of a new legal text.
Classpath exception talks about "executable". This isn't very precise, but at least in normal speech, a library is not an executable, so the classpath exception would not cover other libraries which link to flexiblass. So for example, numpy would not be covered by the exception.
True. But what about the "Linking over a controlled interface exception"? That sounds like exactly this case: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#LinkingOverControlledInterface