🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <36rm5h$5hq@csnews.cs.colorado.edu>,
Tom Christiansen  <tchrist@mox.perl.com> wrote:

>{
>    Somewhere I should add the jibe, er comment that businesses ship
>    product that use tcl/tk and/or perl, and that they couldn't do this if
>    they had no access to nonGPVed versions of these languages, which
>    not insignificantly contributes to their popularity.
>}

I really have to question this again, depending on your
definition of "couldn't."  If you mean "couldn't persuade
company lawyers to accept this," I'll defer since I have had
no experience dealing with corporate lawyers in the process
of releasing a software package.

But if you mean "couldn't do this legally according to the
GPL," I doubt it.  In the first place, I hope you're not
seriously arguing that placing a compiler under the GPL
causes all code written for the language implemented by that
compiler to be GPLed as well.  Even the FSF -- tyrannical
Luddites that people around here seem to claim them to be --
doesn't take that position.  In the second place, there
would be nothing preventing them from shipping these
products with Tcl/Tk or Perl code embedded in them, and
advising their clients that they could receive the source
code for the Tcl or Perl compilers if they wished.  If the
GPL were as restrictive as you claim it to be, then we
wouldn't have umpty-ump companies selling Linux and
Slackware distributions.

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system.  (Reuters, in the Chicago _Tribune_, 9/3/94)