Twisted 1.0.4

Andrew Bennetts andrew-pythonlist at puzzling.org
Tue Apr 22 22:17:41 EDT 2003


On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 10:13:55AM -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 05:18, Andrew Bennetts wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 22, 2003 at 12:34:06PM +0200, Marc Recht wrote:
> > > >to Twisted and Twisted's users.  Similarly, Twisted has some C extensions
> > > >which are typically built with gcc, but gcc's licence (GPL) also has no
> > > >relevance to Twisted.
> > > IIRC then gcc libs are LGPL'ed, so it doesn't affect Twisted. I wouldn't be 
> > > so sure if they were GPL'ed.
> > 
> > No, gcc is GPLed.  I'm not sure what you mean by "gcc libs"?  I'm pretty
> > sure libgcc1 is part of gcc and thus GPLed also.
> 
> No, it's LGPL'd.  GCC itself is GPL, the libraries are LGPL'd.

I stand corrected.  Thanks.  I couldn't find obvious evidence of this
browsing the docs on my local system, so I assumed it was under gcc's
licence.

> > The point is that a C program or library compiled with gcc is not a derived
> > work of gcc, anymore than a thesis written in and printed with MS Word is a
> > derived work of MS Word.  Python isn't GPLed, despite often being compiled
> > with gcc.
> 
> You are forgetting that by compiling your source with gcc, you are most
> likely linking against LGPL'd libraries (even in rather trivial
> programs).  That means that your executable will *contain* LGPL'd code. 
> The LGPL was created just for this purpose: to allow non-GPL'd software
> to link against (L)GPL'd software.

Using gcc doesn't require you to link against anything, let alone LGPLed
libraries -- although of course that is the most common situation; most
systems using gcc will also be using glibc.  But the libraries linked against
are a seperate issue to the point I was making about gcc; using gcc doesn't
necessitate using LGPLed libraries, and its the same situation as applies if
I were to use MS Visual C++ to compile a program linked against an LGPLed
library.

-Andrew.






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