Re: framework

[David Chisnall]

And this is what I am talking about when I say that people should read  
and understand the GPL, and the relevant bits of international  
copyright law it depends upon, before using it...

If you use a GPL'd library then the complete work must be under the  
GPL[1], however each individual part can be under some other GPL- 
compatible license.  You may release a framework that depends on a GPL  
framework under, for example, an MIT license, however the combined  
work of your framework plus the GPL'd framework falls under the GPL.

Note that this does not apply if your framework is a derived work of  
the GPL'd framework (in this case it must be GPL'd), but simply using  
published interfaces for a library does not make your program a  
derived work.  As such, the GPL is only relevant as a distribution  
license, meaning that it is only relevant to people distributing the  
GPL'd framework.  If you are not distributing the GPL'd framework, you  
do not have to comply with the GPL, however anyone distributing your  
framework and the GPL'd framework (e.g. Linux distributions) will have  
to.  Someone can, however, write a drop-in replacement for the GPL'd  
framework in the future and then distribute the MIT-licensed framework  
linked against their version without the GPL being relevant.  See the  
MySQL client library and PHP for a case study in this.

David

[1] Actually, even this isn't quite true, but the other ways of  
complying with the GPL that don't involve this are too complex to  
bother with.

On 28 Aug 2009, at 08:47, Yavor Doganov wrote:

> В Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:21:48 +0100, David Chisnall написа:
>
> > If you are linking against a GPL'd framework, you do not have to make
> > your code GPL'd, you have to release your code under a GPL-compatible
> > license.
>
> This is not accurate.  If you distribute your code and it links  
> against a
> GPL'ed library, you *must* license it under the GPL.  That's the whole
> point in using GPL for libraries:
>
>  http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
>
> IOW, any application or library that links with (say) the GNU  
> Scientific
> Library (GSL) must be GPLv3 or later.
>
> OTOH, if he doesn't distribute his code at all, all licensing
> considerations are moot.
>
>
>
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