Taken from the GNU GPL FAQ: "What legal issues come up if I use GPL-incompatible libraries with GPL software?" http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs
Answer (in part): Both versions of the GPL have an exception to their copyleft, commonly called the system library exception. If the GPL-incompatible libraries you want to use meet the criteria for a system library, then you don't have to do anything special to use them; the requirement to distribute source code for the whole program does not include those libraries, even if you distribute a linked executable containing them. If you want your program to link against a library not covered by the system library exception, you need to provide permission to do that. Below are two example license notices that you can use to do that; one for GPLv3, and the other for GPLv2. In either case, you should put this text in each file to which you are granting this permission. Only the copyright holders for the program can legally release their software under these terms. If you wrote the whole program yourself, then assuming your employer or school does not claim the copyright, you are the copyright holder—so you can authorize the exception. But if you want to use parts of other GPL-covered programs by other authors in your code, you cannot authorize the exception for them. You have to get the approval of the copyright holders of those programs. ~~~ So, all GPL licensed software already comes with an exception regarding the use of non-GPL system libraries. In addition to this, if the copyright holder provides permission to do so then even GPL software is free to use non-GPL *non-system* libraries. If Blender became free to use non-GPL *non-system* libraries, then people could write proprietary library extensions which could be hooked into blender. The non-GPL libraries would require some kind of interface, and that interface would still be required to be GPL licensed software. Does this sound like a reasonable compromise? Is my understanding of this correct? _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers