Laurence Finston wrote:
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
Not sure if I understand you correctly, but if "the Program" uses the library, then the library is part of "the Program", and as such the whole thing must fall under the GNU GPL[0], since "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, [...], to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third aprties under the terms of this License".
I don't think so. For example, my package uses GNU Bison and I include a Bison input file in my sources. If I choose, I can distribute Bison with my package, since its license permits me to do so. It doesn't matter that both my package and Bison are licensed under the GPL; I could do the same with a package with a different license, if the license permitted me to redistribute the package. This doesn't make Bison part of my package or my package part of Bison.
It makes a part of Bison, namely it's parsing code that it copied almost literally, part of your package. Bison contains a special exception to allow linking of it's output (LALR(1) only, up to now) with non-GPL programs. This was discussed very recently on help-bison, so you might have been aware of this, BTW. So you can't generalize from Bison to other packages that don't have such an exception.
Frank