Re: New OS to use gnustep!

[David Chisnall]

On 5 Mar 2013, at 01:24, "Lundberg, Johannes" <johannes@brilliantservice.co.jp> 
wrote:

> Currently we are extending NSWIndow, NSView, etc for our "AppKit". Since 
> GNUstep is GPL we have to consider which parts we can implement into GNUstep 
> and keep open and which parts we keep proprietary. Of course, we want to 
> contribute as much as we can to GNUstep.

Just one small clarification: GNUstep is LGPL (I am not a lawyer, none of this 
is legal advice).  This means that you must:

- provide your customers with the sources for any changes that you make to the 
GNUstep libraries (obviously, we'd rather you pushed them upstream, but that's 
not a requirement)

- Allow your customers to relink their binaries against a modified version of 
GNUstep.  This is almost always done by using shared libraries[1].

You are not, however, required to publish the code for anything that merely 
links against GNUstep, or uses the GNUstep headers.  Specifically, inline 
functions and macros from GNUstep headers do not 'taint' your binary.

More pragmatically, from my experience on the FreeBSD Core Team[2], we have 
seen several companies learn that maintaining a proprietary fork of an open 
source project is often much more expensive than any loss of competitive 
advantage from releasing their changes.  

David

[1] Note: There are several cases of big companies apparently violating this 
requirement of the LGPL.  One of the most prominent is Apple with WebKit on 
iOS, where they do not allow iDevice owners to relink mobile Safari against a 
custom WebKit.  To my knowledge, this has never been tested in court in any 
jurisdiction.

[2] Totally off-topic, but you didn't say what kernel / userland you were 
planning on putting under GNUstep.  We have a very nice one, and it is the one 
where Clang and libobjc2 receive the most testing...

-- Sent from my IBM 1620