Re: Apache and standard C++ library

[Paolo Carlini <pcarlini at suse dot de>]

Jonathan Wakely wrote:

>Re-reading www.roguewave.com/opensource I think this is definitely a good
>thing for open source software and for C++ in general.
>  
>
I concur. Actually, this should be obvious: we all know that Martin's
contributions to our discussions, besides the technical value, always
manifest a deep simpathy for open source (ehm, free software, actually).

>My only reservations are that Apache will require that lib for their
>projects (unlikely though, since it's a high-quality, conforming lib there
>should be no reason for most code to require that particular library)
>and that I assume if I read through the source of some cool feature and
>then later did something similar for libstdc++ I'd risk copyright
>violation ... which is a shame as I'm sure there are lots of cool bits
>I'd like to look at for their own sake (not to steal them).
>  
>
This in an important point, as long as code is supposed to be useful
*for developers* of the library, not for *users* only (*). I would
appreciate clarifications, not only limited to Apache, of course,
because the issue is much more general. In my understanding, what we
*can* definitely do without any problem is using external GPL (with
exceptions) code for v3. Traditionally I stay away from anything
different than GPL, to be safe, but, *maybe* other free licenses (I
think an important superset of GPL is that of free licenses) are also
compatible from this point of view. We (I) should study in detail some
of this, at least:

    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Any lawyer willing to clarify? RMS? Eben Moglen? ;)

Paolo.

(*) And we all know that an important part of the Free Software
philosphy is basically considering everyone a "developer", no-one an
"end-user".