I’m writing this blog post in hope that somebody who’s more experienced than me in open source licensing can suggest me whether such a license exists already, or if a simple well-known exception to GPL would work, or finally if it’s the case that this was submitted to FSF for an eventual future GPL version.
The licensing terms I’m looking for are focused mostly on embedded systems; I just want a license that works exactly like GPL with the exception of leaving it possible to use the code, statically linked in a single binary image, on systems where you really don’t have a final OS, without “infecting” the rest of the system with GPL requirements. It might sound bad to you but there is really nothing more than a special calling interface between the kernel, the runtime linker and the glue code from the compiler that makes a program what it is.
So if instead of having a main() function that gets called, you got a softunit_main() which is called by an otherwise isolated system, and instead of multiple files you got just different addresses in memory, it makes sense to be able to still use it like it was its own software, working at an arm’s length.
This is usually considered area for LGPL, but I’d sincerely like something in the middle between the strict GPL and the lax LGPL. I guess a GPL exception would work out quite fine, but I’m not sincerely sure about it so I’d like to ask for comments.
Thanks in advance!