On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 14:07, 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?

     I will add one more comment.
     Should you decide that your company will be required to distribute its 
sources according to the terms of the GPL, it may be helpful to notice that 
the GPL provides two ways for you to do that. You may EITHER make the sources 
available to everyone (for a required period of time via, for example, a 
website) OR you may provide a copy of the sources to ONLY your customers who 
receive your product. (What they do with those sources is then outside of 
your control.) [My former employer used that second approach to avoid having 
to put what they considered to be "their product" on the website for free 
downloading. By providing all sources to ONLY their customers, they satisfied 
the requirements of the GPL without making their product "too available."]
     That second alternative gets your company out from under having to make 
the sources available long term on a website. This may be attractive for some 
companies who don't want that commitment. And it also tends to limit how 
widely your sources *may* get distributed -- but that will depend on "what 
they [your customers] do with those sources ..."

-- 
Ed Skinner, ed@flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/

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