[Lazarus] GPL'ed projects and closed-sourced tools

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I got told in the CodeGear newsgroups that if you create a GPL'ed
> project, the tools used to create that project must also be GPL'ed
> otherwise somebody might require a commercial compiler to compile the
> GPL'ed project.
> 
> I have never heard anything like this before. As far as I understand,
> if a project is GPL'ed, it relates only to that project or projects
> based on the original project. It has nothing to do with what tools
> (compiler, editor, IDE, OS, etc) you used to create that source code.
> Is my assumption correct?

Your assumption is correct. There are many GPL projects that can be compiled
with MSVCC or Borland C++, and these can hardly be called open source tools.

It is of course 'good practice' to use open source tools for an open source
project for obvious reasons, but there is no requirement to do so.

Michael.