Re: GTK emebedded

[Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang ultim net>]

La plume légère, à Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 01:46:45PM -0500, heure d'inpiration,
Shawn T Amundson écrivait en ces mots:
> A proprietary GDK is highly questionable, at least from a moral and 
> maintainable standpoint.  Is there any particular reason you haven't 
> released this portion of your work under the LGPL?

Probably he was using the word "proprietary" to mean "in-house". When
reading the following, one can see that his companys actually does
respect the (L)GPL requirements since those licenses only covers
redistribution.

> >   AniMeta's rule for any GPL/LGPL sources is simple. We conform with it.
> > And for most cases, AniMeta releases these source codes, libraries to
> > our customers in CD-ROM. And we do not set any special rules to restrict
> > our customers to make use of these SW. Whether open the source codes on
> > Web, all up to customers' decisions.

All of this is perfectly legal. Also, if anyone wanted to sell a GPL'd
software without distributing it first, whether it is his own work or
not, that also would be perfectly legal and understandable. Free
software doesn't mean that programmers haven't the right to live. The
common behaviour of distributing free programs on the Net is just a
"cultural" trend, but is in no way mandatory.

What the GPL requires is that *if* you distribute (for a fee or not)
the binaries you have to distribute the source code for a nominal fee
(or at no charge if possible) for the cost of the medium). All the
rest is permitted. You can also charge money for the source code if
you don't provide binaries.


Wolfgang