Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
Trying to claim, even though you didn't, that Winelib is effected is absurd since it is independent of the debugger. Distributing the debugger with WineLib is merly an aggregation nothing more.
In theory any library that the debugger uses will also fall under the GPL.
In _theory_ yes, but hardly in pratices. No sane court would claim that, not even, would I dare say, the one of Judge Kaplan of DeCSS fame.
Of course Microsoft (I can't remember the link but search on Slashdot) do claim it in their FUD campaign against the GPL but that doesn't make it true.
Whether the GPL:ed is designed to be a "virus" or not is one thing that I will not argue for or against, but copyright law defintely isn't, so I will be quite hard for it to spread in the real world.
And someone shipping Wine binaries may not be aware that parts of it need to be GPLed, and they will get flamed to death on Slashdot.
That is a very convincing argument, yes. :-)
I mostly agree with you that the FSF stance on dynamic linking has no basis in copyright law, but I'm not interested in providing the test case. So if you want to use readline you can patch your local copy, but I won't ship this in the main distribution.
I was pretty sure that would be your answer.