[Gambas-devel] Non-free libraries and Gambas

[Rob]

In my business, I may soon have to buy a license to a proprietary 
toolkit that manipulates images in certain very specific ways for 
which there is no free software equivalent.  I'll be signing an NDA 
and won't be able to release the source (or if I can, it would be 
under NDA as well, with some kind of fee paid to the toolkit vendor) 
to the programs I link against this toolkit, which will be useful to 
only a small fraction of companies in one particular industry anyway. 

That said, I notice that gambas.h has the standard GPL notice at the 
top.  Does this mean it's not possible to legally distribute Gambas 
components that interface to proprietary libraries?  

If it's not possible, no big deal, I'll be writing a C command-line 
program that uses the toolkit anyway and if we need a GUI interface 
I'll just run that program over a pipe using some communication 
protocol I'll have to design.  But there are many industry-specific 
proprietary components for VB, and as much of a supporter of free 
software I am, I wonder if Gambas would be better off if the 
interfaces used to create components were LGPL, not GPL.

I have pretty mixed feelings, because in addition to being 
proprietary, frankly most of those VB components are incomplete, 
buggy, poorly documented and just plain suck.  But some of them 
fulfill the business requirements of few enough companies that no one 
has written free software to do the job.  Having developers targeting 
a Linux desktop use Gambas would at least get the Gambas runtime 
installed on more machines.  So I'd be just as happy using IPC, 
myself, but I figured I'd ask.

Rob