Re: Propriate application distribution and GTK+ dlls.

["Alex Chardash" <achardash gmail com>]

Hello Robert,

Thank you for responce.

Could you please comment more on this.

As far as I understand from LGPL text, GTK+ can be used by commercial projects too. 

As per section (5)

> A program that contains no derivative of any portion of the
Library, but is designed to 
> work with the Library by being compiled or
linked with it, is called a "work that uses 
> the Library".  Such a
work, in isolation, is not a derivative work of the Library, and
> therefore falls outside the scope of this License.

So, the program that uses GTK+ seems to be not required to inherit the license.

The question is, if I'll include a GTK+ dll's into installer, distributive as a whole can be treated as a work derived from the library, since it does contain the library dll's, so the license should be inherited.

But, on other hand, we have a condition in the section (6) declaring the exception:

> As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a "work
> that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of
> the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that
> the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse
> engineering for debugging such modifications.

> You must give prominent notice [...] Also, you must do one of these things:

> b. Use a suitable shared library mechanism
    for linking with the Library.  A suitable 
> mechanism is one that
    (1) uses at run time a copy of the library already present 
> on the
    user's computer system, rather than copying library functions into
    the 
> executable, and (2) will operate properly with a modified
    version of the library, 
> if the user installs one, as long as the
    modified version is interface-compatible 
> with the version that the
    work was made with.

So, I thought, dynamic linkage can be a desired solution, because user will be able to use another GTK+ version and run an application.

What do you think?

Thanks,
- Alex.

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 5:05 PM, Robert Moonen <rmoonen bigpond net au> wrote:

Alex Chardash wrote:

Hello All,

If I'll write a propriate application, that uses GTK+, can I include GTK+
dll's to the program's package (installer)?
 

No, if you use GTK dll's then the application must be open sourced, so if proprietry is your intention then you will have to write your own, or pay license fees to someone providing your foundation class.


cheers

Robert