[TriLUG] borland

[Jeremy P]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Jonathan Magid wrote:

> But I do want to correct the impression that your statement might leave,
> which is that you can't write non-GPL (or even proprietary) software with
> GPL'd tools. You can write proprietary software with gcc/g++ or perl or
> with flex/bison, etc. Pretty much any GPL'd software tool is usable on any
> sort of project. The GPL only prevents you from distributing code under
> that license as proprietary code, or *including that code in your own
> proprietary software*.

And don't forget the "LGPL" which allows you to use library code in
propreitary software.  Many free libraries, such as glibc, use LGPL;
otherwise you'd have a really hard time distributing much of anything for
Linux that isn't GPL.

An example of a GPL-ed library is "readline" (used in programs like bash 
to read input) -- because readline is GPL, you can only include/distribute
it with other GPL-ed code.  This is why many programs that could take
advantage of readline unfortunately don't.

--Jeremy