Re: GTK and wxWindows/GTK Licence

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"   " <heath7952@my-Deja.com> writes: 
>   2. The exception is that you may use, copy, link, modify and distribute
>   under the user's own terms, binary object code versions of works based
>   on the Library.
>
... 
> 
> 6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also compile
> 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.
> 
> 
> Would it be possible to grant WxWindows/GTK users the same 4
> licensing exceptions as are part of the general wxWindows
> license. when solely using GTK with wxWindows. This would greatly
> ease our adoption of GTK for our Unix/Linux customers, rather than
> having to resort to Motif, and hopefully please the lawyers at the
> same time.
> 

Note that this mail is not legal advice, and legal advice should come
from your lawyers. I'm just giving the opinion of an untrained person.

As with the Linux kernel, changing the license on GTK+ is effectively
impossible, because there are a very large number of copyright holders
and all of them would have to agree. So this is not an option.

As I understand clause 6, reverse engineering only has to be permitted
in order to debug modifications to GTK+ used in conjunction with your
work. The intent of the LGPL is basically to allow the user to use
your program with a copy of the library that they have modified and
recompiled, because otherwise their access to the source code of GTK+
would be useless. I imagine your license could still forbid using
reverse engineering to circumvent the licensing key; it's hard to
imagine someone saying in court that they accidentally cracked the
licensing key while debugging a modified GTK+.

I can tell you that most people comply with the LGPL by simply
dynamically linking instead of statically linking, and this seems to
be generally accepted as OK. If you statically link you have to ship a
bunch of object files. In any case, the Linux C library is under the
LGPL as well, so if the LGPL is not acceptable you will not be able to
deploy a proprietary application on Linux. Certainly numerous vendors
have done so, including major vendors such as Oracle and Netscape, so
at least some legal departments are comfortable with this.

Hope that helps. Your Linux distribution vendor may have people that
have a lot of experience discussing this issue with ISVs, I believe we
have such people at Red Hat, if you're planning to deploy on Linux.
Note that I am not such a person, I'm just an engineer. ;-)

Havoc