Re: porting Xlib/Motif apps to GTK+

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 02/29/2012 02:50 AM, Bernhard Schuster wrote:
> If your application license is either GPL or LPGL you are also
> allowed to link statically (afaik), so you can deploy a gtk2 and a
> gtk3 version. Edit ... so you can deploy a shared and statically
> linked application binary.

Just to be clear, if you use and ship GTK as a shared library, the
library remains LPGL, but your app can be licensed however you want it
to be without worries of a license conflict.  If you use GTK in a
statically-linked manner, that might cause some licensing restrictions.
 However I don't think GTK+ will even function properly when
statically-linked to your program.  This is especially true on Windows.

Products like VMWare's VMPlayer and Desktop ship with their own versions
of GTK+ libraries, in case the system libraries are inadequate or
incompatible.  This works pretty well.  The entire GTK+ runtime is well
under 8 MB compressed, depending on how much you remove (image loaders,
etc).  I'm not sure how they figure out compatibility, but launcher
wrappers can easily set linker environment variables to force their
shipped versions of certain shared libraries to load.