|
From: | Jason Rumney |
Subject: | Re: A plea for dynamically loadable extension modules |
Date: | Wed, 30 Jul 2003 15:24:53 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 |
Mario Lang wrote:
I do not fully understand this. If the use of non-free code in Emacs is explicitly forbidden, what is the problem then? If someone would use a dynamic loader extention to integrate commercial code with Emacs, he would just violate the license.
Allowing dynamic linking makes it easier for the end-user to violate the license, perhaps unwittingly, while the distributer of the linked module might technically escape from any wrongdoing since they are not doing the linking. But I think the specific change that the objections were raised about was a general dynamic linking mechanism that would allow Emacs to link to any library. There is another type of dynamic linking, where linked modules would need to conform to an Emacs-specific interface. Then only Emacs-specific modules could be linked to Emacs. It would then be much easier to tell developers of non-Free modules that linked to Emacs to make their code Free, since they could not claim that their module was exempt from the GPL because it was designed to link with 'Y', not with Emacs.
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |