On May 7, 2005, at 6:28 PM, Bill Northcott wrote: So it does not look a bit like an Apple invention. The header is very clear about what is and what is not implemented. So this most definitely NOT a bug. Some people might like it done differently, but others would probably rather stick with BSD licensed software rather than have basic libraries under GPL.
Which is really the principal point here. We make a special point of not shipping GPL'd libraries (LGPL'd libraries are OK) because they do not declare a linking exception and therefore constitute potential land-mines for commercial developers. Apple has a lot of commercial developers and a historical relationship with them that effectively says "If you ship your application linked with system-provided libraries, you can do so safely without having your intellectual property suddenly declared open source." If you link with a GPL'd library, even inadvertently (and, with the increasing prevalence of autoconf, that's even easier than ever), you're GPL'd too.
It would be nice if libreadline was LGPL'd, just as a large number of other GNU project libraries are, but it is not. Until then, we'll do our best to provide an unencumbered compatibility story with libedit, which is BSD licensed and, as Bill notes, not an Apple invention in any way (the *BSD projects have exactly the same concerns). GPL'd applications wishing to use libreadline directly are always (and have always been) free to either install and link with it in a different location or simply bundle it internal to the application, as both bash and gdb do.
Anyone wishing full libreadline compatibility in libedit is also free to submit patches - I'm sure the *BSD folks would love to get them, and we'd be just as happy to pick up those changes in our next re-sync. -- Jordan K. Hubbard Engineering Manager, BSD technology group Apple Computer
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