Re: The impact of a module's license on the requiring Lua program

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> writes:
> About (dynamically) linking to readline: if that's a problem, then
> regular Lua has that problem too....but my understanding is that
> dynamic linking is exactly what LGPL allows with no legal
> complications.

Note that readline is _GPL_, not LGPL.

As for whether dynamic linking triggers the GPL or not ... my
recollection is that the FSF held that it did _if_ the library
interface being used meant that in practice the only likely
library to be used was the GPL'd library -- but that if there
were also non-GPL'd libraries implementing the same interface it
wouldn't trigger.  [The basic reasoning is that the legal system
mostly just disregards technical obfuscation and tries to deduce
the underlying intent.]

By this line of reasoning, I guess you'd be safe dynamically
linking against the readline library, because there are a number
of libraries implementing the same interface.

-Miles

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