glibc2/libio copyright

["Adam J. Richter" <adam@yggdrasil.com>]

Thank you for creating linux-legal.  I have already subscribed, and I
have been mentioning that list in the canned response that I have had
to develop on the glibc2/libio stuff.

Here is the background on the glibc2/libio stuff.

The copyright to the libio module in not LGPL but rather GPL with
some additional permission that do not grant all of the rights of the
LGPL (taken from libio/feof.c extracted from
ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/pub/glibc/glibc-2.0.112.tar.gz):

|   As a special exception, if you link this library with files
|   compiled with a GNU compiler to produce an executable, this does
|   not cause the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General
|   Public License.  This exception does not however invalidate any
|   other reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU
|   General Public License.

Apparently, to qualify for this exception, code must be compiled with a
"GNU compiler" must be "an executable".  It is apparently illegal to
distribute proprietary software compiled with, say, one of the third
party fortran, cobol or native java compilers if they make binaries
that link against glibc2.

It is also at least unclear to me if non-executable proprietary derivative
works, such as third party libraries like Motif, are really legal
when linked against glibc2 since the work is not "an executable."
Richard Stallman has argued that the current copying conditions
could be interpretted to allow proprietary Motif, but I'm not
entirely sure that's enough to resolve the issue, and it's even
less clear that non-essential non-executable derivative works, like
optional run-time loadable modules would qualify.

Anyhow, there are some newer draft copying conditions being discussed,
which are not as clear as something that starts with LGPL, but
which would be improvements to the current libio copying conditions,
and would probably address the specific scenarios that I am most
worried about.  Still, it would greatly simplify things if they would
go to LGPL (prhaps with their additional permissions).

Until this issue is resolved, I think we in the Linux community should
keep our C library options as open as possible.

Adam J. Richter     __     ______________   4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
adam@yggdrasil.com     \ /                  San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630         | g g d r a s i l   United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631      "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."
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