From: Date: July 21 2005 12:09pm
Subject: Re: Clarification of Compiling Procedure
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/plusplus/4675
Message-Id: <20050721100946.GA17420@netdirect.ca>
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On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 06:58:34AM -0600, Warren Young wrote:
> Robin wrote:
> >
> >First I created a Static Library (.a) project 
> 
> Is your program GPL or LGPL?  If not, you need to create a DLL.  You 
> can't do that with v1.7, but I'm in the process of getting this working 
> with VC++ for v2.0.  I'm pretty sure the process is similar under MinGW, 
> but you'll have to figure it out, because I'm not likely to install 
> MinGW myself.  At best, I'll try building under Cygwin with -mno-cygwin.

This is an old message, but curiosity caused me to read the LGPL again.
It is allowed to distribute non-GPL EXE's based on an LGPL'd static
library, but according to section 6a of the license, you must also
distribute all your object files and anything else that the end user
needs to recompile the final EXE.

This allows the end user to make changes to the LGPL'd library and relink
to have a new EXE based on it, as long as the newly built library is
is ABI compatible with the original.

Also, section 6 says that the license for the EXE (which does not have to
be GPL style) must allow the end user to reverse engineer your binary,
and modify that binary (say, with a hex editor).  As far as I can see,
this reverse-engineering restriction applies to EXE's that use LGPL'd
DLL's too.

These are some interesting hurdles to releaseing EXE's using LGPL'd
libraries, but it is possible.  Warren has already done the work needed
to produce a mysql++ DLL, from what I see in the code, so this is somewhat moot.
Thought I'd clarify anyway.

- Chris