Re: does my program need GPL

FROM : Andreas Monitzer
DATE : Sat Jan 12 10:17:44 2002

On Friday, January 11, 2002, at 11:52 , Jens Baumeister wrote:

> I'm no expert on this (and the wording on the GNU site is a bit vague),
> so I
> may very well be wrong, but I researched a similar problem a couple of
> days
> ago and it seemed like the general consenus was that as long as at
> runtime
> your app depends on a GPL program in any way to perform its
> functionality,
> it would need to be GPL'd.
>
> (One example case was this: A frontend for multiple FTP-apps - some GPL,
> some not - would not need to be under the GPL. A frontend for one
> specific
> GPL FTP application however would need to be under the GPL because it
> depens
> upon the GPL application just as it would depend upon a GPL lib. Not
> sure if
> that's common consenus, though.)
>
> Related question: If I don't link to the GPL app but include it in my
> app's
> bundle, I'll probably have to GPL the whole thing, because the GPL
> application is part of my executable, right?


I've released a freeware app that depends on a GPL-tool, pptp-gui
(http://pptp.monitzer.com), the binary is included in the wrapper.
Until now nobody has complained about it, even though this fact is
written in big letters on the main page.
AFAIK (from reading Slashdot mainly), it's ok to bundle GPL-code and
non-GPL-code as long as they don't link with each other (link-time or
runtime). Otherwise, SuSE Linux's yast tool would need to be GPL'd
(which it isn't), since it depends on rpm and other GPL tools.

But nobody really knows, the courts might think different.

andy