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

[Marco van de Voort]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 11:52:49AM +0100, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> > otherwise somebody might require a commercial compiler to compile the
> > GPL'ed project.
> 
> 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.

No. The GPL hits the person who is distributing binaries. If the user does
the final link of open source code to binary proprietary code, and doesn't
distribute the result, this is not a GPL violation.

Since FSF afaik considers dynlinking linking in the GPL sense, distributing
a GPLed binary that links to a proprietary DLL that doesn't come with the OS
is a violation in principle.