From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson) Date: 2003-12-31T16:21:48+09:00 Subject: Re: ruby-dev summary 22273-22434(GPL misconceptions) In article , Shashank Date wrote: > >"Mark J. Reed" wrote in message >news:20031231045245.GA17817@mulan.thereeds.org... >> On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 10:43:38PM -0600, Shashank Date wrote: >> > Is there a document which describes what is new with Oniguruma ? >> > I have compiled the nightly snap-shot with Oniguruma 2.0 but I do not >> > know what to expect ? Any changes that I can try out ? > >I am currently looking at the documentation that came with it and may >be able to find out what the differences are. > >> What's Oniguruma? > >From the README which is included in the package: > > > > Oniguruma is a regular expression library. The characteristics of this > library is that different character encoding for every regular expression > object can be specified. > > Supported character encodings: > > ASCII, ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, UTF-8, EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, Big5 > > > >For me the big difference is that it carries the Ruby license and not the >GPL. I guess I still don't get the problem with the GPL in this case. Just because Ruby uses a GPL'ed component doesn't mean that your Ruby script which you're distributing suddenly becomes covered by the GPL. ....now embedding Ruby into another app _might_ be a different story, but even that seems unlikely. I've not embedded Ruby into another C/C++ app,but I suspect that if you did you would compile Ruby into some sort of shared library (binary) and I really don't think the GPL would effect the rest of your code. (yes, you would have to make the Ruby source code available, but what's the big deal with that?) Check out this article on Groklaw that came out a couple of weeks ago about GPL misconceptions: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031214210634851 Beyond licensing issues (which are tenuous at best) and the character set advantages, what does Oniguruma buy us? I guess I'm a little nervous about replacing something as central as a regex engine at this point, especially if the main reason is because of a misunderstanding of the GPL. Phil