Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
No, it is enough that it is GPL compatible which the Wine
license is.
But then the code can no longer be distributed under a non GPL compatible license, while this is allowed by the Wine license.
winedbg _binaries_ compiled with --enable-readline quite possibly.
As far as the source code to winedbg is concerned maybe but probably not. It might depend on whether --enable-readline or --disable-readline is the default, but that remains to be tested in court, but it is not certain it matters at all. The court might quite reasonably rule that no linking to readline has taken place yet and thus no derived work can have been created and even if they hold that some sort of linking has taken place it might not consider it a derived work.
In short linking, especially potential linking, do not always imply a derived work which is all that matters as far as the law is concerned.
Also note that I'm not convinced that any court will hold that the GPL is different from the LGPL in any relevant way with the possible exception of in bad faith trying to circumvent the requirements by trying to be "clever".
Of course it is a little unclear that you really can do unlawful circumvention of license requirements. This is a like claiming that somebody circumvented trespassing your land by moving around it. Either you trespass or you do not. Either you violate the license or you do not.
The analogy is quite good even in other areas: Even if you are on somebodies land you do not nessary trespass either because of copyright like "fair use" requirements in the law of most countries.
As a sidenote: In Sweden "fair use" concerning trespass is so extensive that I never heard about _any_ case concerning it.
I think the benefit of using readline in the debugger is much too small to justify the potential license issues this would cause.
Only the debugger (winedbg) links with readline => only the debugger can be effected.
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.
-
Patrik Stridvall