RE: License Question

["Williams, Gerald S (Jerry)" <gsw at agere dot com>]

Larry Hall wrote:
> Clearly, the answer to your question comes down to an
> interpretation of the GPL.  As strange as it seems, the 
> answer is also outside the scope of this mailing list.
> It's a legal question that's best answered by a lawyer.
[...]
> However, if you read the GPL carefully, I think you will
> note that it mentions that the GPL would extend to your 
> program since it relies on the GPL'd components to work.   

IANASCJ (I am not a Supreme Court Justice), but quoting
from http://cygwin.com/licensing.html:

 In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits
 programs whose sources are distributed under a license that
 complies with the Open Source definition to be linked with
 libcygwin.a without libcygwin.a itself causing the resulting
 program to be covered by the GNU GPL.

Perhaps it's not in the scope of this list, although this
seems to be the crux of the issue. If the Berkeley MPEG
encoder qualifies as Open Source, then it seems that you
should be able to use it under the Berkeley license terms
rather than the GPL. But who decides whether it qualifies?
I suppose you'd want to get something in writing on that.

Of course, if the requirement is really just Gnu tools and
not underlying environment support, you might want to try
compiling with -mno-cygwin and avoid the issue altogether.

> It's not worth any more than your own in this matter though
> since I'm not a lawyer.

Or a Supreme Court Justice. :-)

gsw

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