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by gphil
5349 days ago
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Sure. My understanding is that you can't include GPL'd code in a project that is not itself licensed under the GPL. This may be an oversimplification, since you could potentially use the tools without actually including them in a project, but this is sort of a legal gray area that I don't fully understand (e.g. what constitutes inclusion of GPL'd code in a project?) |
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Our distribution gem -- well, technically, Claudio's distribution gem, but used by SciRuby -- has some Ruby code in it derived from C code in the GNU Scientific Library. Being a GNU library, GSL is licensed under the GPL.
Interestingly, the GSL-derived code is only utilized if the user does not have libgsl installed. And my understanding is that code which uses libgsl is not technically a derivative work, and therefore not required to be GPL'd itself.
I suppose one possibility is to abstract the GPL'd code into yet another gem (distribution-gsl?), which is itself licensed under the GPL.