No, the GPL license for GNU Readline is very intentional. There is a bunch of written history from Richard Stallman about it. He felt it provided such an larg

No, the GPL license for GNU Readline is very intentional. There is a bunch of written history from Richard Stallman about it. He felt it provided such an large advantage, that some programs might switch to GPL to use GNU Readline. After 35 years of development (started in 1989 according to Wiki), it has a hefty start is someone wants to beat it with a "clean room" BSD-licensed edition. Some HN info about Stallman's reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26606328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26606328 I cannot find any specific writing from him, but I am sure I read words from him about 25 years ago. > I'd rather code be maximally unencumbered from interoperation. Yes, the problem is that commercial organizations would like open source to do all the hard work for them. Then, they use the software internally, and don't give anything back -- except two pence via RedHat licensing. (We have learned this the hard way in the last 10 years of major security bugs due to underfunded projects.) However, you are free to re-implement the API and license it in a different way.