Re: Binary only module overview

[Crispin Cowan <crispin@wirex.com>]

David Weinehall wrote:

>On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 12:17:37PM -0700, Crispin Cowan wrote:
>
>>That is not clear to me. I have been unable to find a definitive 
>>reference that states that is the case.  If so, it is problematic, 
>>because then every user-land program that ever #include'd errno.h from 
>>glibc is GPL'd, because glibc #include's errno.h, among other GPL'd 
>>kernel header files. Are you sure you want to declare nearly all 
>>proprietary Linux applications to be in violation of the GPL?
>>
>AFAIK, the glibc (and most other libraries) are LGPL rather than GPL.
>
It appears that while glibc is LGPL, it in turn #include's stuff from 
the kernel.  It more or less has to; otherwise glibc has to guess the 
format of data structures the kernel is going to export.

Greg is partially correct that this is a licensing issue that the glibc 
maintainers need to resolve. However, I am not convinced that they can 
resolve it on their own. I see only the following possible resolutions:

    * we all decide (an opinion) that #include some_gpl.h does not GPL
      the code doing the including
    * glibc changes its license to GPL, which would make it unpopular
      among proprietary application developers
    * Linux maintainers decide to change the license on the relevant
      header files to LGPL

If one of the above does not happen, then I think I can derive "false" :-)

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html