What I was trying to ask is if we made the back end of SN a shared library, libSNdb.so, would every thing that linked to this library have to be GPL'd or would the library be able to be treated as a LGPL work? Ian? -rob "Davies, Mike" wrote: > > What if we had some sort of Corba type middle ware that provided a > > decent distributed API, without actually linking the code in. > > Would any > > application that connected to it still be bound by the GPL? > > Any changes you made to the Sourcenav Code would be GPLed and you would have > to provide them in the usual ways, however it seems to me that any > application that used the CORBA interface would be effectively dynamically > linked to it and so might escape the GPL. > > > I am trying to find out here if there is any room for commercial > > developers to contribute to SN. It would be a shame to let > > it all go to > > waste. > > Well, many commercial firms contribute to GPLed SW, there is nothing > stopping you from doing that. If you are trying to make a proprietry > version of SourceNav then this is prohibited by the licence. That is quite > apart from the implications for the feelings of people who contributed their > efforts freely for the common good. > > Mike Davies