Re: Redistribution of GTK DLLs

[Daniel Kasak <d j kasak dk gmail com>]

Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

If you're in doubt, I think the best way to do this is to distribute things
separately. Just make an installer / updater for the GTK libs ( that would
be handy, by the way ... oh and if you build some Windows themes, *please*
distribute these too ). Then in your MIT licensed app, say "You'll need GTK
libs ... and an installer / updater exists at location <blah>".

This would surely not break any licenses, as they're separate projects.

Dan


On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 7:16 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav gmail com> wrote:

> I have a Pike GTK app that works on Windows and Linux (and
> theoretically other platforms but I haven't tested it). The Windows
> version of Pike distributes GTK DLLs for 2.12.11, which has some flaws
> compared to 2.24.10 which I use elsewhere. So it would be convenient
> for my users if I could have a simple command inside my app that goes
> and fetches eighteen files (including Pango, Cairo, etc) and deploys
> them to the correct location.
>
> And therein is a licensing problem. GTK is licensed LGPL, but my app
> is under the freer MIT license. So the question is: Am I making a
> derivative/combined work by making an installer that fetches GTK DLLs?
>
> I don't want to have to mess with the licensing of my project (putting
> some of it under the (L)GPL) for the sake of a convenience feature,
> but on the flip side, there's no point listing lengthy instructions
> saying "go download this, extract this, put this this this and this in
> here, then restart the program" if I can say "enter this one-word
> command".
>
> What's the rule on distributing DLLs with non-GPL software? The GPL
> FAQ has a lot, but not really what I'm after.
>
> Thanks!
>
> ChrisA
> _______________________________________________
> gtk-app-devel-list mailing list
> gtk-app-devel-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list