Re: gtkmm capabilities

[Roel Vanhout <roel riks nl>]

Russell Shaw wrote:
> Roel Vanhout wrote:
> > Unless your project is licensed under an LGPL compatible license, 
> > gtkmm is not an option for you if you want to link it statically.
> IIRC, that's incorrect, because the project can be distributed such that 
> the
> user can link the separate LGPL objects.

Well that's one interpretation of the LGPL. Not everyone agrees 
(http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=439136). Plus, even if 
you'd use the liberal (ie Eben Moglen's interpretation), you'd need to 
license your application in a way that allows your users to 
reverse-engineer and modify your application. From section 6 of the LGPL:

6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine 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.

This would be unacceptable for most commercial application that are 
released nowadays.

All of this is for the interpretation of the LGPL in the context of US 
copyright law, I won't even go into the implications of distribution 
outside of the US under LGPL terms. 'Real' commercial licenses have 
stood up in courts all over the world, I know of no cases where the LGPL 
has been court-tested (GPL has been (more or less) found valid in the 
Netfilter/Sitecom case in Germany last year, but that was for the GPL 
which is much clearer than the LGPL).

cheers,

roel