Re: Some Question about License

[Hongli Lai <hongli plan99 net>]

Zhan Zhaohua wrote:
> Dear:
>
>     Our organization is planning a big project which
> is a Linux-Embedded system and will be sold as
> products in the market.
>     Through our investigation, We want to use Gtk+ at
> our system. But when we investigate the license of
> gtk+ we met some trouble.
>
>     We know the when we compiling the GTK+, we need
> those sofeware which record at
> "http://www.gtk.org/api/2.6/gtk/gtk-building.html";
>    They are:
>        1. pkg-config
>        2. TIFF
>        3. Libpng
>        4. JPEG
>        5. cairo
>        6. FreeType
>        7. libiconv
>        8. gettext
>        9. Glib
>        10. Pango
>        11. ATK 
>
>    So which is necessary for the Gtk usage? 

pkg-config is only required for building GTK (and dependencies) from 
source. Cairo is only required for GTK 2.8 - you can use earlier 
versions of GTK if you don't want Cairo.

Glib (utility library), ATK (accessibility) and Pango (font system) are 
required. I'm not sure whether the other dependencies can be optional.

>       4. GPL/LGPL 

libjpeg is not GPL, but instead uses its own license (the Fedora RPM 
calls it "redistributable"). You should read it yourself by downloading 
jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz at http://www.ijg.org/
See the "LEGAL ISSUES" section of the README file.

And you may want to read the GPL FAQ: 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
That page also answers a few questions about the LGPL.

The LGPL boils down to something like this: you can dynamically link to 
LGPL libraries, and you can distribute LGPL libraries with your 
(proprietary) application, but you must also provide the source code of 
the LGPL libraries.
I'm not a lawyer though.