Re: Redistribution of GTK DLLs

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan upstairslabs com>]

On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 17:13 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Daniel Kasak <d j kasak dk gmail com> wrote:
> > 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>".
>
> So, effectively, I make a separately-downloadable thing that I'd
> license more restrictively than the rest of my app. Hmm. Seems an odd
> way to do things.

Personally I wouldnt like to do it this way either, on win32 I would
rather not trust DLL sharing - and rather just pack everything into
the same bundle and run it, avoiding any possible binary
incompatibilities which might otherwise creep in.

I don't believe that your MIT licensing problem is any different than
a proprietary license for your app, at least with regards to the
usage of LGPL libraries.

I.e. using LGPL libraries does not infect the calling code which
links these libraries in with the GPL contagion - what is required
is that if you do distribute these libraries in compiled form, you
must also make available those LGPL sources which were used to build
those said libraries.

Since these particular LGPL sources are already made available by
other parties (i.e. GTK+ & friends by GNOME etc) - I believe
that you do not need to host these files directly - but must somehow
at least link to these sources when distributing your app, possibly
in your application release notes, on your website if any, and
ideally in some text which reaches those people you distribute software
to (I.e. perhaps in a GtkAboutDialog somewhere it would be prudent to
mention that the application is built with LGPL libraries which are
available at some specific location).

I am not a lawyer either, but this is my understanding of the issue.

Cheers,
    -Tristan


> ChrisA
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