Quoting Zhan Zhaohua: > 1. We would like to know wether we have to obtain > some special license or patent to be allowed to use > DirectFB commercially because we will use DirectFB in > our product to be sold in the market. Though we know > that DirectFB is under the LGPL, we are still not > quite sure what to do with the situation of commercial > use. > If so, could you tell us the operation flow and > how much money we have to pay for it if necessary.
As Clemens already answered, in principle LGPL means that you can link against the library without the need to open your own source code. Whether it's static or dynamic makes a difference as Clemens wrote, but I wouldn't insist on releasing object files if anyone links statically against DirectFB :-) If you write your own modules for DirectFB, e.g. input or graphics drivers, you can do that closed source, too. But if you make changes to the DirectFB library source itself you'd have to give back those changes to the community. > 2. Which develop mode of the DirectFB ? For Example: > 1 manager,2 developer ... DirectFB follows the open source development model. There are a few people actively involved in development that are directly committing their changes to the CVS (version control system). Lots of other people are sending patches that are mostly applied by me or the others. If you like to call it a manager, you're talking about me :) > 3. Which test method of the DirectFB? How many test > items of DirectFB? What's the test coverage? There are no unit tests, yet. I've started a framework once, but the lack of time kept me from continuing. But you'll find some useful example programs. For testing graphics drivers, especially their performance, you can use df_dok and df_andi from the DirectFB-examples package. The first one is a benchmark and the second one is a small test for a lot of sprites and double/triple buffering. > 4. Is there commercial support exist? What's the fee > of it? I'm working on DirectFB based projects as a contractor for major companies, but time is a beast and I'm overloaded for at least the next few months. If you give me some more information on what you need, I can check if I can find other people. Maybe there are already some interested people on this list willing to work on DirectFB based projects in a commercial context, if not already doing so :) Looks like incorporating a new company for all this is coming nearer. > 5. Which library is necessary for use the DirectFB. It depends on which modules you are going to use. The main library requires libc + libpthread and for dynamically loading modules libdl, but even if you link against libdirectfb dynamically you can link all its modules statically into the dynamic library (without using libdl). Other modules require additional libraries: FreeType2 Font Loader - libfreetype2 PNG Image Provider - libpng, libz JPEG Image Provider - libjpeg ... -- Best regards, Denis Oliver Kropp .------------------------------------------. | DirectFB - Hardware accelerated graphics | | http://www.directfb.org/ | "------------------------------------------" _______________________________________________ directfb-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.directfb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/directfb-users
