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Re: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to gstep, aga in


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Re: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to gstep, aga in on Win NT?
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 12:12:04 +0100

On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 11:42 AM, Mike Llewellyn wrote:



Many thanks for the pointers.

On another issue, would be v. interested in your view;

My situation is this;
We are selling a system that includes custom hardware and supporting software. Part of the software is written in ObjC (WO 4.01, NT), and at the moment we are obliged to buy a full WO Developer license from Apple each time we sell to a customer.

As you can imagine this is less than ideal.

I have a limited block of time to rewrite the software such that we do not have to pay any license fee. I have a number of options, including MS C++, some kind of Java, perhaps MS .NET, and of course one of libFoundation, gstep-base, or even the Darwin Foundation-type libraries.

My natural preference would be an Objective-C based solution, since that is my main programming background and because it still seems to be a superior language. It should, in theory, also be the simplest and most rapid solution.

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 (the development libraries etc) is *NOT* GPL'd ... it's LGPL, which is quite another thing! The LGPL specifically permits you to link with the libraries without distributing your source code, but if you change/fix the libraries themselves, you need to make those changes (and just those
changes) available as source.

Some tools and applications built using the GNUstep libraries are GPL'd, but that doesn't mean you need to release your source code any more than using GNU/Linux or using gcc does.

Cygwin is GPL, but MSYS is not ... so if you want to write 'safe' proprietory software (ie not need to distribute the source code for that software), then you should probably use GNUstep with MINGW/MSYS (though it *is* quite possible to develop on Cygwin without including the cygwin runtime in your code).




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