Implications of GNU Readline's GPL License
An important example of an application changing its licensing to comply with the copyleft conditions of GNU readline is CLISP, an implementation of Common Lisp. Originally released in 1987, it changed to the GPL license in 1992, after an email exchange between one of CLISP's original author's, Bruno Haible, and Richard Stallman, in which Stallman argued that the linking of readline in CLISP meant that Haible was required to re-license CLISP under the GPL if he wished to distribute the implementation of CLISP which used readline.
Alternative command line editing libraries which are permissively licensed can be used by software projects which want to implement command line editing functionality, but wish to remain under a permissive license. For example the Glasgow Haskell Compiler uses Haskeline (which is licenced under the 3 clause BSD license). Similar libraries are listed in the external links.
Read more about this topic: GNU Readline
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