Re: a licensing question

[Michael L Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Tue, 2004-11-02 at 23:43 +0100, Raven wrote:
> I've got some questions regarding licensing of GTK.

Please read through the terms of the LGPL [1].  It's not that difficult
of a document to understand.  As with any source code license, you must
understand the terms of the license itself.

> *1. Is it ok to use GTK to write software, that is proprietary, commercial 
> and closed-source?

Yes it is okay, provided you dynamically link to the GTK libraries
(which what most people do normally).  This is the gnerally accepted
position in relationship to the LGPL.

> *2. We are starting writing a toolkit/framework dealing with some "high 
> level of abstraction data-to-GUI patterns". Would it be if we made it based 
> on GTK+2.0 ?? Essentially it would be :
> **2.1. a kind of database engine
> **2.2. set of sophisticated GUI controls ("tree view" for example, etc.) 
> whose goal is communicating with the database engine
> 

Anything that is a deritive work of GTK itself must be LGPL.  In other
words if you modify the GTK source code, then you are bound by it's
license so any modifications to the GTK libraries themselves need to be
licensed under the LGPL.  So if you distribute a modified version of
GTK, you must also make available the source code for those changes
under the terms of the LGPL.  However you can still produce an app that
links against such modified GTK libraries that is not under the  LGPL.

I believe that creating new GUI widgets based on GTK is not a direct
modification of GTK itself, so such widgets need not be under the LGPL.

If there any concerns or ambiguities in your mind, you must consult a
lawyer, just like you would do when using code under any license.

In short, you can use GTK as a gui toolkit library in a closed source
environment.

Michael


[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html


> TIA. 
> 
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