From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Apr 16 06:23:38 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 57C6237B401 for ; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 06:23:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pa-plum1b-166.pit.adelphia.net (pa-plum1b-122.pit.adelphia.net [24.53.161.122]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9FC4A43FCB for ; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 06:23:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com (working [172.16.0.95]) h3GDNQJP018058; Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:23:36 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Message-ID: <3E9D594E.2050205@potentialtech.com> Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 09:23:26 -0400 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030301 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Socketd References: <20030416145014.26715310.db@traceroute.dk> In-Reply-To: <20030416145014.26715310.db@traceroute.dk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: License questions X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 13:23:38 -0000 I am not a lawyer. If you're running a business you should seek professional legal advice. Here's my opinion/experience, however. Socketd wrote: > I would like to use FreeBSD to make commercial and free software. For that > I use a number of programs and third-party libraries (I program in C++). My > guess it that there is no problem with using antuja, gnome, c++ doc and other > programs for this, but what about the libraries? Some of them are released > under the BSD license, but other under GPL or LGPL. > My question is, can I use libraries like dbconnect, common c++, gtkzthread > (which are all under the GPL or LGPL) to make closed-source, commercial > software? Maybe. You can do it with LGPL, but not with GPL. Not being able to _every_ create closed-source software from GPLed stuff is a fundamental precept of the GPL. > Also, if I want to release software under the BSD license, does the license > have to be included in every file I write? I'm not sure, but it should would be safer that way (no chance of "I didn't get the license with this distro") I think you should at least put in a notification that the software is distributed under the BSD license. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com