RE: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to gstep, aga in on Win NT?

[Nicola Pero]

> However, reading through the GPL I'm not convinced that it does suit my
> situation to use gstep, since I am not in a position to be able to publish
> source code to the software, as it appears the license will require me to
> do.

gnustep is LGPL and not GPL ... and that is precisely so that you can
develop proprietary applications which use gnustep.

You surely can.

There are tons of examples of proprietary software which uses LGPL
libraries ... most system libraries shipped with GNU/linux (in particular
libc) are LGPL - and you can develop proprietary software on GNU/linux.  
You can buy binary-only proprietary software in shops which links against
those LGPL frameworks - it's standard practice.

But I'm quite happy you took the licensing issue seriously and read the
licenses - just you read the wrong one. :-)

If you distribute gnustep libraries as part of your product, there are a
few things you need to comply with - more or less as follows -

 you must write somewhere in your product (may be in the help or in the
 readme) how to get the full source code for gnustep (and all LGPL you
 use) from the web.

 if you make any changes to the source code of gnustep itself, you must
 make all those changes available (eg, on your website).  more likely,
 assuming the changes you do are useful, you just send them to us, and
 we merge them into the mainstream version and then the mainstream
 version contains your changes and there is nothing you need to do 
 since everyone gets your changes when they get the mainstream version.

Of course, the exact terms are on the text of the LGPL - don't take my
word - which is just a rough resume - but read the LGPL yourself :-)


>From what you describe, you seem to be quite knowledged in ObjC / OpenStep
... so I think you would be very happy with gnustep-base.

gnustep-base is a very mature product.  It has a very very long history -
that first recorded changelog entry is from 1993 ... which is 8 years ago.
8 years spent working on it ... and still actively working on it !  It's a
great product, and getting better and better.  There is currently active
work to have it work / work well on Windows (and also have the gui library
work on windows!) ... we would appreciate your help :-)