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

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Kamal Dalal wrote:

> 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.

No.  All that happens is that if one wants to use PuTTY's code in
a non-LGPL compatible manner, he loses the bidi support, which
comes from FriBidi.  Everything else is there.  This is what Wine
project is doing.

> 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
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>

--behdad
  behdad.org