'GPL encumbrance problems' (jdow)

[Mike McCarty]

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).

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? 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.
Actual creative work should not, in Richard Stallman's view,
be compensated. At least not in a certain way.

Mike
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