On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 00:34 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote: > STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT) wrote: > >>>Does your application work without the GPL library? No? So your > >>>application _needs_ someone else his copyrighted work to > >> > >>function. So > >> > >>>you _need_ the work someone else did to make money? And you _demand_ > >>>that it comes for free and gratis! If you don't like the > >> > >>GPL license of > >> > >>>the library, rewrite it, nothing stops you from doing that. > >> > > The direction this discussion is going seems to be that if code > > makes use of a shared library (.so) directly or indiretly which > > is GPL'ed and that code is to be distributed, it has to be GPL'ed. > > A quick check of my FC4 box shows 654 .so files in /usr/lib. (not > > counting soft links.) Is there a list showing which of these are > > LGPL and which are GPL? > > Not quite, but almost. GPL and LGPL make different claims. For GPL, > AIUI, what you say is correct. For LGPL, it only says that you > have to provide everything needed to rebuild. If you use other > libraries to rebuild, then you have to supply copies of the libraries > you link with. If the other libraries do not permit this, then > you cannot distribute the executable. > > > I seem to remember that libc.so is LGPL, so that takes care of > > the "hello world" program. > > That about sums it up. I have never released a commercial program > for Linux, and probably never will. Mostly because Linux is not > Linux, but rather Linux+GNU, and all of GNU is GPL or LGPL. > Linux per se is not the problem, the problem is that *building* > for Linux uses GNU, which, like all FSF stuff, is GPL or LGPL, > both of which are highly infective (though LGPL is slighly less > so). Non-sense. The Linux glibc's and other fundamental system libraries' licenses (e.g. libstdc++) have been carefully chosen to allow this case. > Maybe Borland will come out with a nice compiler for Linux, and > we'll be able to develop good commercial software for Linux. Who > knows? Non-sense. Neither does using GNU tools to develop software for linux doesn't put them under the GPL nor will proprietary toolchains help you to circumvent glibc. > Borland's licenses for the link library are much more generous > than the FSF's. The FSF is dedicated to the proposition that > developers should not be compensated for their work, only > maintainers and distributers, and they only for value added. Non-sense. How do you think do SW vendors implement commercial SW for Linux? Ralf
