Re: [Fribidi-discuss] Re: my Bidi implementation

[Kamal Dalal <kamal at banoora dot net>]

Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> I think there's something really basic I'm missing. Why does putty need 
> any license change at all?
>
> Even if they want to statically link fribidi, they can do that under the 
> LGPL license. All they have to do is to provide means for other people 
> to create a version of putty that has a different fribidi 
> implementation. As putty is open source itself, that requirement is 
> always met.
>
> Is there something I'm missing here?
>
>                Shachar

Yes, it is possible as far as Fibidi's license is concerned, but then 
PuTTY will not be completely MIT. A work derived from PuTTY (MIT) can do 
whatever they want with the sources, including changing it and closing 
the sources of the derived work. If Fribidi becomes part of PuTTY then 
the MIT licence is constrained by the LGPL.

Linking dynamically to Fribidi can resolve this issue, but PuTTY's 
authors do not like this solution (what was their argument?). On the 
other hand, implementing Bidi inside PuTTY would probably inflate its 
size beyond recognition, and then PuTTY looses one of its attractive 
points which is the small size (I think it can fit on a diskette).

Perhaps PuTTY's authors would reconsider if they have to choose between 
size inflation or dynamic optional plug (DLL) that is LGPL.

Kamal