On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 11:34:14PM +0200, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 11:23:06PM +0300, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
I'm not an expert on licensing, and I thought to ask this
question here - I'm
not trying to make any emails flame war - just need a
simple answer...
A friend of mine is toying with an idea to write a frame
buffer driver instead
of the x11drv on wine, but he doesn't think his boss will
allow to release
the code..
Can he (legally) write the driver, bundle it with the
lgpl'd wine and sell
it? or is this illegal?
If the driver interfaces with the rest of Wine through a clearly defined library API, and his proprietary code is distributed as separate object code that can be relinked with Wine at runtime or at build time (i.e., made available as either .o files or as a .so shared lib), then this is unquestionably permitted by the LGPL.
True in general but unfortunately the Wine display driver API wouldn't IMHO be classified as a clearly defined API...
So whether this is allowed is a little unclear to say the least.
Perhaps I've relayed it in an unclear manner, but that's my failing, not the LGPL's. When I say it must interface with the rest of Wine through a clearly defined API, I mean that any changes you make to existing Wine APIs in order to interface to this new driver must be released under the LGPL: you can only keep those parts of your code closed which do not include portions of someone else's LGPLed code.
Steve Langasek postmodern programmer