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

Graeme Geldenhuys graemeg.lists at gmail.com
Wed Mar 4 17:32:19 CET 2009


On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich
<DrDiettrich1 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> AFAIR there exists a requirement (how strong?), that a user shall be
> able to build the project from the source code, so that everybody can
> trust his selfmade binaries, and is not bound to binaries supplied by
> third parties. For this reason all modified source code must be made
> available to the users.

To Hans-Peter, Marco and svaa,

You all miss understood my question - and which has already been
answered. I'll explain my question again. Lets say we have a
commercial editor/IDE called EditorA which uses a commercial compiler
called CompilerA. The question was, can I use EditorA and CompilerA to
create open source desktop application called ProductB.

The original author argued no, because EditorA and CompilerA is not
open source products. He said that if somebody wanted to use the
source code of ProductB, they would be forced to buy EditorA and
CompilerA. I disagreed with the first part and said "tough shit" to
the second part. The GPL relates to ProductB *only* and not to the
tools (EditorA and CompilerA) used to create that product.

The original author said that you cannot use the commercial Delphi IDE
and compiler to create open source software. I said BULL!
SourceForge.net is full of open source projects created with Delphi.
:-)

Regards,
  - Graeme -


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