Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It's obviously the LGPL which I've come across with the GPL'd utility libraries that I've used, rather than the "full" GPL. Thanks for the clarification.
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It
is confusing.
One of the things I run here is
Cygwin, a port of the Gnu toolchain to Win32, available as a free, open source offering under the GPL. Rather than rewrite every utility to use Win32 system calls instead of *nix calls, the developers wrote a POSIX compatibility library implemented as a DLL, containing a subset of the most used *nix system calls. Lots of *nix code builds "out of the box" under Cygwin, because the code links against the Cygwin1.dll, and sees the *nix routines it expects.
A full Cygwin install includes the GCC compiler suite. One of the questions on the Cygwin mailing list is "Can I use Cygwin GCC to build closed-source code?" The answer is "Yes, if you use the MinGW version, which links against the Microsoft runtime rather than the Cygwin version." Linking against the Cygwin1.dll
would make your code GPL, but the MS runtime does not, and there is no requirement on GCC itself that you may only build GPLed code with it.
Another common question is "If I write GPLed code, must I distribute the source with it?" The answer is "No. You simply have to be willing to provide it, and must inform the user you will do so and state how to get it. You must be careful, because the user should be able to use the source you supply to duplicate the binaries you created, so the source you provide must be the source that created those binaries. But you are not required to provide the source in the same distribution as the binaries. Most users won't want it and wouldn't be able to use it in any case. You simply must provide it on demand, in a convenient form for the user."
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Dennis