[H-GEN] GPL question

[Paul Gearon]

Trent Waddington wrote:

> Obviously you're allowed to link anything you want to anything else you 
> want and no-one can do a damn thing about it.. what you can't do is then 
> *distribute* that combined work as something non-GPL (which is where all 
> the other aspects of the GPL license come into play).
> 
> Hope that clarifys things.

Well that just follows my own link of thinking.

I was thinking of a situation where a dynamic library was supplied as 
GPL only.  Leaving the issues of header files aside for a moment, it 
should be possible to build and distribute a non-GPL program that uses 
this library.  You simply need to state that the library must be 
installed on your system in order to run the program.  You could then 
choose to distribute the GPLed library and its source, but that's up to you.

The only way I can think that this might be wrong is tied up with the 
definitions used for the symbols in the library.  Typically these are in 
headers, and I guess that by "including" a GPLed header you could be 
considered to extending that source.  However, does a "#include" fall 
into the category of "copying, distribution or modification"?  If not 
then it would seem that the GPL would allow it.

-- 
Regards,
Paul Gearon

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