On 6 Feb 10 8:34 PM, Rob Mensching wrote: > Sadly, not well at all. GPL and CPL are not compatible.<sigh/> >
You're correct that the GPL and CPL are not compatible. The question that was not addressed, however, is what of *L*GPL? LGPL (the Lesser GPL) is not the same as the GPL. IANAL but I understand that there should be no problem /using /LGPL libraries. From what I understand, the CPL and the LGPL are kissing cousins. Stallman detests the LGPL because it violates his purist aims to have all software "free". The GPL is designed to build a wall around "free" software, available only to other "free" software projects. The theory is that this walled garden of unique and superior software will attract more people to come into the walled garden and work on "free" software. If you use anything in the walled garden, your software must remain in the garden. The LGPL breaks what the "viral" or "infectious" part of the GPL. A LGPL library's source code is itself ruled by the GPL, but any software that /uses/ the library is not. Any software, including proprietary software, may use a LGPL library without GPL cross-contamination. In other words, if you alter LGPL code to tweak the /library/, you're bound by the GPL to publish that tweak that you did to the /library/. If you /use/ a LGPL library, you're not required to play in the walled garden (and thus Stallman's irritation with the LGPL). Here's a quote from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html This article tries to persuade people to play only in the walled garden by not using the LGPL because "We free software developers should support one another." The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Lesser GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs. The only baggage that comes with redistributing an LGPL library is the requirement to make the source of the library available. That's a bit of a bother, even if it's a zipped snapshot. That in and of itself may be enough of a barrier to make it undesirable to /distribute/ the LGPL'ed library. However, if one installs MySQL separately, WiX wouldn't have to distribute any source snapshots. That would be something that the person /using/ WiX would have to decide on. ... but IANAL so take anything I say here with a bucket of salt. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
