| Bruce Badger 2005-09-18, 6:58 pm |
| On Sun, 18 Sep 2005 17:48:25 +0000, steve geringer wrote:
> Bruce Badger wrote:
> ...but the lawyer will be on the side of caution as they usually
> are...which means they will tell you to avoid GPLed code for commercial
> programming efforts. this is the same conclusion I had already, but now
> I am out a few thousand in legal fees.
Well, lawyers are supposed to have your (the clients) best interests in
mind :-|
.... and on a commercial project you would be duly diligent no matter what
license you sign up for, so you'll be paying lawyers fees anyway. One
benefit of the GPL in this context is the massive amount of software
available under the one license. Oh, and the GPL is very small, so the
lawyer would need rather less reading time than for other licenses :-)
> it is my understanding that with GPL, everything you build with it must
> also be open sourced.
No, that's not the case. The easiest example is that of a C program. If
you write a C program and compile it using the GCC (a GPLed compiler
suite) your software does not have to be released under the GPL.
> with LGPL (Library-GPL) it is not as restictive. The library can be
> used to build non-open source software. only changes to the library
> itself must be made open source.
The issue is that of Linking. Really. Have a look at the GPL, it's
really short.
> with Smalltalk...the library is the language. AFAIK the GNU Smalltalk
> Library is GPLed so anything built must be made open source.
The "must" is not clear. If you look at the C example above, the intent
is clearly to allow people to make software using GPLed software that does
not itself become GPLed software. In the C world this hinges around the
"linking" idea. In a dynamic environment like Smalltalk if you don't
change the VM or the supplied (GPLed) classes, then you are in a similar
situation to the C programmer using GCC and .so or .dll library files (but
IANAL).
> has anyone out there built non-open source software with Gnu Smalltalk?
I am not aware of any.
Note that I'm not trying to persuade the use of GNU Smalltalk here. I am
just keen to see that the issues surrounding it's license are made clear.
All the best,
Bruce
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