Re: GTK+ Licensing issue: Ch binding

[wcheng softintegration com (Wayne W. Cheng)]

> On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 19:55, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Owen, we've been through a conversation with this guy about his bundling
> > of GTK+ binaries with his language binding for it.
> > http://lists.gnome.org/archives/language-bindings/2003-January/msg00002.html
> > and that has led to some improvements/clarifications because he wants to
> > do the right thing.
> > 
> > This is the end result. It seems more or less OK, but I'd like your
> > approval of his licensing, because I'm uneasy about the prominent "No
> > Modification of Licensed Software" clause, with a less prominent "Those
> > open source components are governed by their licenses" clause.
> 
> I don't want to give any firm statement that the complete Ch GTK+
> binding system is in compliance with the LGPL:
> 
>  A) I'm not a lawyer
>  B) I'd have to examine the entire distribution to have any opinion
> 
> The "common sense" interpretation of the LGPL is that if:
> 
> A) the user can modify the GTK+ sources, and rebuild the system to
>    use the modified sources
> B) source is provided for all modifications to GTK+ and those
>    modifications can be redistributed under the LGPL
> 
> then things are probably OK. But I don't see any problem with having
> the license be done as an exception to a more restrictive license.
> >From my opinion, going ahead and adding the link from the language
> binding page should be fine.
> Regards,
>                                             Owen

Hi Owen,

Thanks for your reply and confirmation.

We build bindings to ODBC, Win32 and OpenGL etc, we don't modify 
third party's source code since it will increase the maitenance cost. 
The same for our binding to GTK+. I believe it is the advantage of 
C/C++ interpreter for binding and scripting without modification request.

GTK+ binding takes us more efforts due to its complexity.
we have slight modifications of header files for scripting in the 
distributing, though the compiled binary libary is downloaded directly
from GTK+ website without modification. 
Those modifications are distributed and covered
under the same LGPL license. We wish those modifications will
be adopted in GTK+ next release. I don't remember if we submit
the patches long time ago. But we will submit the patches
again once we review the bindings for GTK+ 2.2. 

Best regards,

Wayne 

Wayne Cheng <mailto: wcheng softintegration com>
SoftIntegration, Inc.
http://www.softintegration.com
Tel: +1 (530) 297-7398 Fax: +1 (530) 297-7392