On Wednesday 29 September 2004 02:07 pm, Nathan England wrote:
> My company is having problems with the GPL. We are concerned about the
> 'viral' effects of the GPL. Can we use GPL libraries in our software
> without open sourcing it?
> Are there libraries we can use that aren't GPL?
> We are 75% linux oriented, but would like a library that could cross OS
> boundaries. Are there any GPL libraries we could do that with, without
> open sourcing our code?
>
> We would like to use a lot of GPL stuff, but are genuinely afraid of the
> 'viral' effects.
> Can someone point me to a good explanation of how it all works, so we
> don't include a GPL library we shouldn't...
> I would really appreciate it.

I wrote up a thing about the KDE/Qt licensing issue which touches on the GPL 
(KDE is LGPL but the free version of Qt is GPL).  It might help you:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/books/kde-2.0-development/ch19.html

In short:
Q: "Can we use GPL libraries in our software without open sourcing it?"
A: No.  You can use LGPL libraries but using GPL libraries requires that
   either your application is GPL compatible OR you get a special licensing
   agreement with the creators of the library to allow your app to link
   to it

Kurt
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