Re: luaprompt

[Kevin Martin <kev82@...>]

> I must say I anticipated objections to the GPL but now I'm a little confused.  The same person who says the library is next to unusable if its placed under the GPL later says that he'd consider using it because it's a great commercial weapon.


As a developer in a small company (we develop software to solve a specific optimization problem), I can tell you that we almost entirely avoid GPL licensed things. In one instance we utilise some LGPL software where there is a better performing GPL equivalent. Neglecting the implications of having to release commercially sensitive code, the distribution requirements are too difficult for us to manage. It's our understanding that the GPL means we can't distribute a modified Debian VM without maintaining a source archive of every GPL package installed on the VM - whether we have modified the package or not.

I think the GPL has its uses, and I would agree with the other poster, that it is a great commercial weapon. I think the license someone chooses very much depends on what they want to achieve. However, I do think that you have to bear in mind that it isolates a lot of smaller companies, who do not have the financial ability/resources to either release all their code or manage the distribution requirements of the GPL.

What I'm trying to say is that for us, your library released under the GPL would be unusable too, but that doesn't make the GPL bad, or mean we wouldn't use the GPL for some of our algorithms.

> The only reason for me not to go with the GPL would be if this strategy would ultimately benefit free software but I can't see why that would be so for the time being.

Just my opinion, but you will get free testing/patches/suggestions/advice/etc from your users, and you will get more users the less restrictive your license.
    
> Thanks I'll change that.  I never really took the trouble to figure out why the order of specifications of libraries and source files is significant.  If anyone'd care to enlighten me...

As I understand it, the linux linker is single pass, and when scanning objects/libraries, it looks for the symbols it knows it needs. If a library is included before another that requires it, the linker will not yet know that it requires the symbol, and thus not include it.

(very minor point, but If lua was GPL, I wouldn't be reading this mailing list, and I wouldn't have answered that question) 

Thanks,
Kevin