There is this interesting claim in the readline homepage: http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/r

There is this interesting claim in the readline homepage: http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html "Readline is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3. This means that if you want to use Readline in a program that you release or distribute to anyone, the program must be free software and have a GPL-compatible license." That's interesting, it does not say it must use GPL (which is what I expected, it seems a direct contradiction to the article we just read) and so libss being MIT seems fine. Nothing in libss source seems to include anything from readline, no header file, no copying portions of header file even, just some very small words in the dl loader like"readline", "add_history", "rl_forced_update_display", and so forth. I would hope that is fair use. I would say that Oracle though might have a problem though if can't study the source freely for their client. But it seems wrong in someway that they should have such a problem since they copied so little and so indirectly. To be safe, they should modify libss and distribute a version where DEFAULT_LIBPATH in their private source includes no traces to readline. It's sort of ironic though regarding the recent Oracle v. Google ruling, to be sure theyu really should also modify most editline function names to something like oracle_foo_0, oracle_foo_1, ... shouldn't they ;) Seriously, this is a very interesting question, it's a good one for a lawyer in fact.