KBabel/win32: GNU gettext license

Jaroslaw Staniek <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.kde.licensing
Organization Open Office Polska
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,
It's GPL. But we've used the sources in kdesdk/kbabel/common/libgettext/.
KBabel is GPL too, but recently we're adding an license exception to be able 
to deliver KBabel/win32 compiled with commercial Qt/win32 as many people 
asked. AFAIK, virually all KBabel authors agree on the exception, but I am not 
sure about status of source code in kdesdk/kbabel/common/libgettext/.

The funny thing is that gettext already links to non-GPL library, 'msvcrt', 
within Cygwin project and similar efforts:

http://gettext.sourceforge.net/

GPL license allows to link with nonGPL runtime libraries shipped with 
compiler. That's unclear because we can pretty well consider unmodified Qt as 
an runtime. 'Where's the boundary?' question looks like a philosophical issue 
for me.


Here's a bit of discussion with dfaure:
----------
jstaniek	dfaure: hmm, about kbabel/common/libgettext...
	|<--	bram85 has left irc.freenode.net (Remote closed the connection)
	jstaniek	dfaure: that's funny because cygwin released it
	dfaure	hmm so?
	jstaniek	and even if this is still GPL...
	jstaniek	it is dynlinked with non-GPL stuff
	jstaniek	i mean: msvcrt.dll
	jstaniek	(otherwise it coudnt display on the console)
	dfaure	I don't know msvcrt's license. AFAIK the problem is linking GPL code 
to Qt.
	jstaniek	no problem with extracting common/libgettext to separate GPL lib
	dfaure	hmm you're right, it's "qt code linking to GPL code" here, not "GPL 
code linking to qt code"
	jstaniek	msvcrt is far 'more closed' than any Qt
	dfaure	not sure about that - if it allows anything to link to it...
	jstaniek	http://gettext.sourceforge.net/
	jstaniek	dfaure: we've got a fundamental problem here : "Is Qt a runtime for us"
	jstaniek	it's for me here
	jstaniek	but since common/libgettext/ doesn't link to qt. . the problem is 
solved, yeah?
----------

Any advices welcome! Anything that allow us to go forward.

Eventually we can make a separate process, run it, and communicate via 
stdin/stdout channels with it.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam,
  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska / Kexi Team
  Developers Wanted! Kexi 0.1 Beta 5 Released: http://www.kexi-project.org
  KDElibs/Windows: http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32
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