Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 20:13:50 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: mike@smith.net.au, tlambert@primenet.com, hsu@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@hub.freebsd.org Subject: Re: shared library with static Motif? Message-ID: <199712062013.NAA28454@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <17481.881387632@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Dec 5, 97 09:53:52 pm
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> I think what Terry's confused about is the part of the license which > essentially attempts to disallow anyone from including the shared > libraries and/or headers in a form which allow completely different > applications to link against and use them. I think they attempt to prevent distribution of linkable non-static libraries unless you have an "Executive" license, which makes you a Motif Distributor. The real answer is "it depends on the developers license". Making something linkable so that you can link against the Motif libraries without paying a royalty to "the open group" is what they are attempting to disallow. OS vendors can bundle the cost of a shared library royalty in with the cost of the OS. Or they can do a "technology buy-in", like Novell did with NUC (the NetWare UNIX Client) and get a crosslicense so it costs them nothing for any of the other technology (Novell paid no royalty for distribution of Motif for UnixWare). If you allow developement, then you must pay for linkable images. In the shared library cost, that royalty cost is covered in the OS developement system (compilers, etc.). Otherwise you don't get the headers, even if you get the libs. You may statically link the application, so long as you do not expost the statically linked library for reuse by a third party. > I also have a slight advantage in this debate, having talked just a > couple of weeks ago to the Open Group managers who are in charge of > the Motif licensing issues, and they assured me that static linking, > as long as it wasn't for the express purpose of somehow "wrapping" the > development libraries in a way that could still be directly exploited > by another C/C++ programmer, is quite fine. I believe this is *precisely* what Jeffrey was asking "is this OK to do?" about, and for which I said "no". Agreeing with the managers you talked to: it's disallowed by the license. > I then asked them about > "moat", the Motif interface for TCL which allows one to do precisely > that in a TCL interpreter but is shippied static. They said that this > was fine too, and that they were in the process of making Motif's > license a fair bit easier to swallow from the whole static/dynamic > linking perspective (they weren't precise, but I got the feeling that > they may be focusing strictly on the header files in any future > "compliance enforcement" issues). This is interesting. Lesstif is well known to have read the header files in their developement effort (there are archived list messages to that effect). They may be starting to feel their presence a bit... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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