Meld's Bazaar support

[Aaron Bentley]

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Robert Collins wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 18:56 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> That is, shipping a core dump of a python program requires a
> distribution licence from the copyright holder. Shipping a .py file on
> its own does not.

Under that interpretation, it would be easy to write shims to allow
proprietary clients to use GPLed libraries, and distribute only the
shims in source form.

>> And while there may be legal
>> technicalities that would allow me to skirt the GPL, I consider it
>> immoral to take advantage of any such loopholes.
> 
> Its not about loophools.

For me, it is.  I'm going to honor an author's intent, whether or not
they have legal standing to enforce it.  I consider implementation
language a technicality.

So I'm asking again: What is our intent with bzrlib?  Do we intend for
it to be used by BSD and proprietary clients?

> The fundamental problem is that the GPL is
> written for C and C like languages. This is an issue for other
> communities too - perl, ruby, smalltalk. 

And Lisp, presumably?  Surely Stallman would have considered that...

> I think meld is very strange having two modules with mixed licences - at
> best its going to confuse people. See this discussion for instance.

It certainly can be frustrating.

>> It seems to me that the FSF's claim the GPL extends to clients of
>> GPLed
>> libraries depends upon interface copyright.  If it was established
>> *not*
>> to exist, I believe the GPL would be greatly weakened.
> 
> Not at all - it depends upon the behaviour of C/C++/fortran/mono/
> compilers and the habits and desired people have to ship binaries.

I think it's doubtful that the amount of text included by dynamically
linking could form the basis of a copyright claim, but I haven't
examined that issue deeply.

Aaron
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