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

[Matt Henley]

My understanding and I am not a lawyer is that you are correct.. The
gpl faq addresses this (
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html ):

I'm writing a Windows application with Microsoft Visual C++ (or Visual
Basic) and I will be releasing it under the GPL. Is dynamically
linking my program with the Visual C++ (or Visual Basic) run-time
library permitted under the GPL?

The GPL permits this because that run-time library normally
accompanies the compiler or interpreter you are using. So it falls
under the exception in GPL section 3.
That doesn't mean it is a good idea to write the program so that it
only runs on Windows. Doing so results in a program that is free
software but “trapped” (in this case, trapped by Windows instead of by
Java, but the effect is the same). (Historical note: As of December
2006 Sun is in the middle of rereleasing its Java platform under GNU
GPL.)


On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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