Re: gtkmm capabilities

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Roel Vanhout wrote:
> 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.

It would only be unacceptable to pre-free-source licences.

With a distribution of objects, no reverse engineering is needed,
because only the LGPL libraries need to accessible to the user,
who can get the source for them anyway.

> 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

If any commercial app is going to be done with LGPL static libs, the
licence should be modified for that. There's no law against modifying
your licence to allow users to upgrade and relink the LGPL objects.