Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 5 Aug 2009, at 21:15, Don Stewart wrote:
>    The Library is distributed under the terms of the GNU Library  
> General
>    Public License version 2 (included below).
>
>    As a special exception to the Q Public Licence, ** you may develop
>    application programs, reusable components and other software  
> items that
>    link with the original or modified versions of the Compiler and  
> are not
>    made available to the general public, without any of the additional
>    requirements listed in clause 6c of the Q Public licence. **

That excerpt is highly confusing.  Which is it?  LGPL or QPL?

In fact, the license of the _compiler_ is QPL, and of the _library_ is  
LGPL.  The compiler has an exception to the QPL, and the library has  
an exception to the LGPL.  The LGPL exception is:

As a special exception to the GNU Library General Public License, you  
may link, statically or dynamically, a "work that uses the Library"  
with a publicly distributed version of the Library to produce an  
executable file containing portions of the Library, and distribute  
that executable file under terms of your choice, without any of the  
additional requirements listed in clause 6 of the GNU Library General  
Public License. By "a publicly distributed version of the Library", we  
mean either the unmodified Library as distributed by INRIA, or a  
modified version of the Library that is distributed under the  
conditions defined in clause 3 of the GNU Library General Public  
License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons  
why the executable file might be covered by the GNU Library General  
Public License.

Regards,
     Malcolm