Re: Licensing

[<wurzin ywave com>]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 wurzin ywave com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Is there a means by which I can acquire permission to link to all of the
> libraries associated with, and including gtk for the production of a
> commercial product?
>
> I would like to write several programs that would be nice to have, and I
> need to eat.
>
> I'm hoping that it's possible so that I can code using gtk and still be
> able to sell the resultant executables without being forced to give my
> code away or include any object files.
>
> I just want to make some shareware stuff that expires after like 30 days
> of use after which a person can log onto a website, and register the
> software for like $20.
>
> Has anyone done this yet?  I saw nothing about it in the FAQs that I read.
>
> wurzin ywave com

I appreciate all of the responses to my inquiry.  Thanks for your time in
answering. :)

I see that ATK, GLIB, GTK, and Pango all use the LGPL "Library General
Public License", or as it's called now the "Lesser General Public
License".

Although I can't see that the desire on the part of the authors for these
copyrights was to eliminate the possible participation of proprietary
software in free software environments such as Linux; The wording of the
licenses is non-the-less pretty heavy handed and restrictive.

They don't spell out things sufficiently such as the difference between
statically linking and dynamically linking software to open source
libraries.  They also state things in such a manner as to give themselves
unlimited rights to works linked to such libraries depending on ones
interpretation of the licenses wording.  Exactly what I would expect a
lawyer to do.

I would like to believe, and am going to proceed under the assumption
that their actual intent was to keep big corporate conglomerates from
snatching up free software, copyrighting it, and then selling it as their
own rather than free software conglomerates snatching up proprietary
efforts in this environment and claiming them as THEIR own; Both practices
I believe we would all find reprehensible.

So... I'm glad to be a part of this community and I hope that we'll be
able to mutually enrich our lives and the operating environments that
we've all grown to enjoy so much. :)


wurzin ywave com