On Friday, 7 February 2020 at 19:51:52 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
On Friday, 7 February 2020 at 18:16:37 UTC, Les De Ridder wrote:
On Friday, 7 February 2020 at 14:23:58 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
[...]
Now the sad part. I would like to use GtkD at work but I
can't. The license is really dangerous for companies (you
compile lGpl source code into your application), therefore it
is a complete no go from the IP department. The license is a
huge blocker for GtkD commercial usage.
I'm not sure why LGPL is an issue. Does GtkD not allow dynamic
linking?
I am not an expert at all in the topic of licensing. This is my
understanding:
Gtk has the license lgpl. As long as you link dynamically to
the shared object files, you can use it in commercial products.
GtkD is a D wrapper for GTK. It is D source code which ease the
access to the C api of Gtk. GtkD has also the license lgpl. To
use GtkD in my application I have to statically link the D
source code.
Now it gets more complicated, GtkD has some additions to the
lgpl rules.
I cannot judge how high the risk is for companies to use this
component, but as an employee I do anything to avoid any risk
for the company I work for.
Kind regards
Andre
GtkD's COPYING file contains the following:
2. Static linking of applications or any other source to the
GtkD
library does not constitute a modified or derivative work and
does not
require the author(s) to provide source code for said work, use
the
shared GtkD libraries, or link their applications against a
user-supplied version of GtkD.
Looking at the GtkD code, it seems much of it was written in a way
specifically to avoid licensing issues, e.g. by loading libraries
and
populating function pointers at runtime[1][2]. I'm not sure it
even
*supports* static linking with GTK libraries.
I compiled one of the GtkD examples[3] on Linux with dub, and was
able
to confirm with `ltrace` that it indeed loads the GTK libraries at
runtime using `dlopen` when compiling with the default
configuration.
[1]
https://github.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD/blob/master/src/gtkd/Loader.d
[2]
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD/master/generated/gtkd/gtk/c/functions.d
[3]
https://github.com/gtkd-developers/GtkD/tree/master/demos/gtkD/TestWindow
