On Tue, 17 Jun 2003 wurzin@ywave.com wrote: > Hi, > > Is there a means by which I can acquire permission to link to all of the > libraries associated with, and including gtk for the production of a > commercial product? > > I would like to write several programs that would be nice to have, and I > need to eat. > > I'm hoping that it's possible so that I can code using gtk and still be > able to sell the resultant executables without being forced to give my > code away or include any object files. > > I just want to make some shareware stuff that expires after like 30 days > of use after which a person can log onto a website, and register the > software for like $20. > > Has anyone done this yet? I saw nothing about it in the FAQs that I read. > > wurzin@ywave.com I appreciate all of the responses to my inquiry. Thanks for your time in answering. :) I see that ATK, GLIB, GTK, and Pango all use the LGPL "Library General Public License", or as it's called now the "Lesser General Public License". Although I can't see that the desire on the part of the authors for these copyrights was to eliminate the possible participation of proprietary software in free software environments such as Linux; The wording of the licenses is non-the-less pretty heavy handed and restrictive. They don't spell out things sufficiently such as the difference between statically linking and dynamically linking software to open source libraries. They also state things in such a manner as to give themselves unlimited rights to works linked to such libraries depending on ones interpretation of the licenses wording. Exactly what I would expect a lawyer to do. I would like to believe, and am going to proceed under the assumption that their actual intent was to keep big corporate conglomerates from snatching up free software, copyrighting it, and then selling it as their own rather than free software conglomerates snatching up proprietary efforts in this environment and claiming them as THEIR own; Both practices I believe we would all find reprehensible. So... I'm glad to be a part of this community and I hope that we'll be able to mutually enrich our lives and the operating environments that we've all grown to enjoy so much. :) wurzin@ywave.com
