Re: gtkmm capabilities

[Roel Vanhout <roel riks nl>]

Russell Shaw wrote:
> It would seem so, but you could make a licence that restricts reverse
> engineering to bug fixing, which is a bit vague.

The LGPL could indeed have been written this way, but it's not. And if 
you mean 'you could write your own license for you own program that 
restricts reverse engineering to bug fixing', then that would be 
irrelevant: the LGPL prohibits that so you could not use an LGPL library 
in a product that is released under such a license.

>     *  a) Accompany the work with the complete corresponding 
> machine-readable source code for the Library including whatever changes 
> were used in the work (which must be distributed under Sections 1 and 2 
> above); and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with 
> the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object 
> code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and 
> then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified 
> Library. (It is understood that the user who changes the contents of 
> definitions files in the Library will not necessarily be able to 
> recompile the application to use the modified definitions.)
>
> It says the closed part can be supplied as an object, and only the library
> needs to have source available.

Yes, but that's just one of the conditions. The first sentence of 
Section 6 *also* requires you to put the *whole program* under a license 
that allows reverse engineering for the purposes of retrofitting a 
different/modified version of the (LGPL) library that is used. And that 
is what many commercial vendors do not want. See, this is what I meant 
when I said that licenses are complex and usually *very* interwoven :)

cheers,

roel