On Mon, 5 Feb 2007, Ravi Mathur wrote:
Hey everyone,
I have been reading up on the OSG license and the LGPL license. From what I
understand, OSG and Producer are distributed under the OSG license (basically
the wxWindows license), but OpenThreads is still distributed under the LGPL
license. The question I have is, can we still develop a non open source app
that uses OSG? Since OSG uses OpenThreads, and the LGPL license isn't very
friendly to closed source software (the reason wxWindows was created in the
first place), this seems like a barrier to proprietary software using OSG!
For example ... my app links with the OSG libs, which in turn link with
Producer and OpenThreads. According to the OSG license, I can distribute the
OSG and Producer binaries under my own terms, but OpenThreads (being LGPL)
requires that my app basically be open source also (sections 5&6 of LGPL).
The LGPL allows run-time linking of any application, open source or otherwise,
to a piece of software covered by the LGPL, so what you are attempting is
perfectly legal. But if you distribute your application, you are required
to distribute the source of the OpenThreads library under the LGPL, especially
if you have modified it in any way. I think the same restrictions apply to
Producer and OpenSceneGraph. You are not required to distribute the source
code to your application if they merely link to the other libraries.
IANAL, YMMV, etc.
--
____ __ Eric Sokolowsky (GST) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
/ __/__/_/__ Visualization Programmer Scientific Visualization Studio
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