Big development in the GUI realm

[Steve Holden]

Luke Skywalker wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 18:30:18 +0100, Michael Goettsche.
> <mail at tuxipuxi.org> wrote:
> 
>>Not 100% right. Only drivers for commercial databases will not be included, 
>>mysql and co. are available.
> 
> 
> What I find weird, is that I always understood the GPL meaning that
> you must give back any contribution you made to the source code of the
> GPLed code, but not if you're just using either a binary distribution
> (eg. a DLL) or if you copy/pasted the code as is, with no changes on
> your own.
> 
> If this is true, then the fact that Qt is now GPLed for Windows means
> that I should be able to use this widget set even in commercial apps
> since I'm not making any change to Qt, just using it.
> 
> Am I totally off-target?
> 
Yes.

The GPL only dictates what you *must* do when you re-distribute GPL'd 
code, or code derived from GPL'd code - and there's substantial room for 
disagreement about what is and what is';t a derived product, with a 
recent opinion suggesting that the FSF would regard importing a GPL'd 
Python module as making your Python program constitute a "derived product".

As long as you don't redistribute anything you are free to do whatever 
you want with GPL'd code. The intent of the license is essentially to 
stop proprietary freeloaders from benefiting from GPL'd code without 
giving anything back to the community. Microsoft choose to call this 
"viral", but as usual they are talking out of their wallet.

regards
  Steve
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