Hello, Sean! Well, first have a look at the license of gerbv, which is according to it's website GPLv2: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
I can give you just a very rough direction of what I understood from some documents I received from professional legal stuff: It depends how you access GPLed Software (as gerbv) and/or its libraries. If you link against it, and share data structures in between your application and the GPL code, you have to publish your code as well. If you execute GPL code via fork, exec or call it from command line, you usually don't need to publish your code. Linking against GPL code and only execute it's main() routine without sharing data structures is considered as a border case. I strongly recommend to consult a lawyer specialised in Open Source licensing and has programming knowledge, as "it all depends...". Regards, Clemens Koller -- Fa. Dipl.-Ing. Clemens Koller Embeon Systemdesign und Elektronik http://www.embeon.de --- On 05/15/2014 10:50 AM, Sean Crees wrote: > Hello, > > I am not sure if this is the correct forum for this question, please > forgive me if not. > > The company I work for has a CFD application for modelling Electronics > Equipment. We have received user requests to import Gerber files. I have > found references to gerbv and it looks like a useful tool, especially as > it is also available as a library, but it seems that as it is GPL we > will not be able to make use of it. > > Can anyone shed any light on whether we could use it, or of anything > similar we could use to parse/convert Gerber files. We are a commercial > software organisation, and are willing to pay for tools such as this > when they save us development effort. > > Many Thanks for any guidance. > > Sean Crees. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > "Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE > Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. > Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available > Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free." > http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs > _______________________________________________ > Gerbv-devel mailing list > Gerbv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gerbv-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free." http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs _______________________________________________ Gerbv-devel mailing list Gerbv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gerbv-devel
