fwd: UFFI and CLISP copyright

[Hoehle, Joerg-C. <Joe...@t-...>]

Hi,

I'm sorry to raise the copyright issue once again.

Kevin Rosenberg wrote in uffi-users:
>I'm in favor of adding CLISP support to
>UFFI. What's the legal status of incorporating modified versions of
>your code into UFFI. UFFI, as you may know, is licensed under BSD. I
>believe that CLISP has restrictions on referring to internal symbols
>unless such referrents are licensed under the GPL.

One would believe that note b) of COPYRIGHT applies, but
1. FFI is not mentioned in the explicit list of CLISP's public packages
2. the note says "and"
3. "...a great number of CL implementations"

So far, my UFFI wrapper macros make use of FFI package internal stuff, but I don't believe that makes a difference.

I was wondering whether slime is better positioned than UFFI w.r.t. copyright issues: UFFI macros are split on a #+xyz case across each and every file, while slime has a easily separatable swank-clisp.lisp file.  Presumably, that doesn't make a difference to a lawyer (and Emacs is GPL anyway).

Summary: it's completely unclear to me whether the UFFI package can contain in its file #+clisp ffi:foobar forms and keep its BSD copyright.

Regards,
	Jorg Hohle.