[Mono-dev] Off topic: Reflection and Licensing question

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> The idea of reflection in a system makes difficult to determine where
> the fine line is.  That said, my _personal_ belief is that using
> reflection does not constitute linking.  Here is my justification for
> that belief:

This is an incorrect believe.

If you are running on the same address space, the author of the code
would have to explicitly do that by opting into using the GNU LGPL, from
the GPL text:

        This General Public License does not permit incorporating your
        program into proprietary programs.  If your program is a
        subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit
        linking proprietary applications with the library.  If this is
        what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License
        instead of this License.
        
How the actual linking is done (static linker, dynamic linker or runtime
linking with dlopen/dlsym) do not matter.   The result is the
incorporation of the GPL code in the proprietary code, and that code
must be GPL compatible.

Miguel.