Re: Commercial GTK+ development tool

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Carl Best" <cbest alpha ipswitch com> writes:

> I have been musing about the possibility of a commercially developed
> and marketed Rapid Application Development Environment (i.e. Delphi)
> using GTK+ (and possibly support for GNOME widgets) as the base
> widget set. This may not be the forum to ask the following
> questions, but here goes anyway (I AM SURE FLAMES ARE SOON TO FOLLOW
> :):

This is a reasonable place to ask the question. Since the question
is "about GTK+" rather than "how to do X in GTK+", it might be
a little better to ask it on gtk-list.
  
> 1) Does the LGPL license that GTK+ is distributed under prohibit the
> creation of a closed source object oriented wrapper library (say in
> C++ or a hand crafted object oriented scripting language) This
> library would be used by a RAD IDE to provide a method to rapidly
> create applications for Linux/Unix and be supported and maintained.

This is entirely fine; no problems.

In a nutshell, what the LGPL says is:

 - If you modify GTK+, you must provide the code to your 
   modification.

 - If you link to GTK+, the user must be able to relink
   to a different version of GTK+. Or your application
   is considered a modification of GTK+.

There is no significant difference between a wrapper library or
language binding that uses GTK+ and an application that uses
GTK+.

Regards,
                                        Owen