Re: Using a script licensed under GPL in an application licensed under a license that's not compatible with GPL

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.1925.1166198761.2155.gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org>,
 "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams@gnu.org> wrote:

>    > As long as the program simply does fork/exec, this is true.  But
>    > the OP explicitly states that he is `importing' the script into
>    > the program.
> 
>    That's another word that isn't normally used to describe use of
>    scripts, so it's not clear what he meant.  I assumed he meant that
>    he's simply invoking the script as a command.
> 
> Which one? Importing or fork/exec?

Importing

However, I've seen the OP's followup, where he shows using the "import" 
command in Python.  I'm not very familiar with that language, so I 
didn't know it used this word to refer to loading definitions from a 
library script.

When he originally wrote "scripts", I was archaically thinking just of 
shell scripts.  Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby is much more like 
C programming, and the things you do by linking with libraries in C are 
done with "use", "require", and "import" in these languages.  These are 
comparable to dynamic linking in compiled languages, so it would make 
sense to treat them equivalently for purposes of license application.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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