Re: The impact of a module's license on the requiring Lua

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> Lua on Linux uses readline. This is not an abstract issue.

I've been worried ever since that linked document claimed that
readline _was_ a problem for non-GPL software, despite Miles'
assurances.

Well, working around the damange: I'm going to make linenoise an
option for luabuild. It's perfect for the usual use scenario, and it's
only about 600 lines of C so it can be statically linked. And, as the
man page for readline itself says, "It's too big and too slow". Mike
Pall very deliberately does not link LuaJIT against readline because
he has empirical evidence that it significantly slows down
non-interactive invocations of the interpreter.

By derfault, statically-linked Linux executables with luabuild do not
link against readline, but if you're actually distributing an
interactive application you do need some support for editing and
history, so I'll include the binding against linenoise for that.

Yes, a tool for static linking is potentially a minefield. I'm going
to very careful about this, because respect for licenses is part of
the core open source ethos. (and it can get you into trouble) (Oh, and
actually stick a proper MIT/X11 license on the thing ;))

steve d.