[sigc] License Problems



Hello!
I stumbled across a legal traphole in libsigcs license today.
The agenda on the license page clearly states that libsigc is meant to be used in "all projects both open and proprietary", however a detail in the LGPL license makes this nearly impossible. Section 5 paragraph 3 states that 'When a "work that uses the Library" uses material from a header file that is part of the Library, the object code for the work may be a derivative work of the Library even though the source code is not.' This concerns libsigc++, because major parts of the implementation are in the header files and are therefore compiled into the object files of programs that are, from a programmers point of view, only using the library. Hence the license forces you do opensource everything that uses libsigc. I think this is not intended and originates in the fact that templates are not compiled into object code before actually instancing them.

-MElvert




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