Re: LGPL license effects

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Re: LGPL license effects
by Sarang on Saturday 10/Jan/2004, @06:16

But dosn't linking to KDE automatically link the application to Qt? If a qt link is there, then you need their commercial license to write closed-source applications right?

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Re: LGPL license effects
by Evan on Saturday 10/Jan/2004, @11:01

In this scheme you wouldn't be linking with KDE. You'd dynamically link your application with a small library with stubs for file dialogs and stuff. This library would be LGPL or something, and would implement the file dialogs etc using GTK. No license issues there, obviously. Just a little indirection.

Now, if someone wanted the programs on their computer to use Qt dialogs instead of GTK ones, they'd write a new dynamic library which implemented the same interface but used Qt as the backend. They'd then overwrite the first dynamic library with the new one, and boom, programs would magically have Qt dialogs.

Obviously the second library would have to be GPL. But this isn't a problem--the GPL specifically allows you to do whatever the hell you want with GPL code, including linking with libraries having an incompatible license, as long as you don't distribute the result. Which you wouldn't need to do.

That's merely one way of many perfectly legal and acceptible ways to accomplish this; it probably works a little differently in real life.

And that doesn't even consider the approaches where distributing the source code is perfectly legal, but distributing a binary is not.

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