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

[Pascal Bourguignon]

> From: Nicola Pero <nicola@brainstorm.co.uk>
> 
> gnustep is LGPL and not GPL ... and that is precisely so that you can
> develop proprietary applications which use gnustep.
> 
> You surely can.
> [...]
> 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.

Better yet, just put a copy of the sources of the LGPL libraries along
with your product on the distribution medium.  This has two advantages:

    1- it shows a better attitude IMHO,

    2- it allow  the customer to correct, personalize,  or do whatever
    he may need to do with the exact LGPL'ed sources you used to build
    your product. For example this  would allow them easily to correct
    a bug  or add  a feature  in the LGPL'ed  shared library  you use,
    better than if you just gave an URL, because that URL could become
    obsolete or could  point now to a newer,  incompatible, version of
    the LGPL'ed library.
 

>  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.

Ah yes, too:

   3- you  need to give  a copy of  the LGPL'ed sources anyway  if you
   changed them.


> 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 :-)


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