Re: [fluid-dev] Another application using FluidSynth announced

[David Henningsson]

On 09/11/2011 09:49 PM, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 09:28:31PM +0200, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> > But as I've said, if the compiler and developer tools are "freeware"
> > or not is irrelevant from the license point of view, in my
> > opinion. These are the same tools used to build all Mac OSX
> > applications; any legal restriction because a GPL interpretation
> > would mean that developing GPL applications for Mac OSX would be
> > forbidden as well.
>
> Uh, no. They are so not-irrelevant that the GPL contains an explicit
> clause to handle this case, without which it would be very hard to
> write GPL applications on non-free platforms.

Maybe the section you quoted below is what makes the free-compiler 
question irrelevant then?

Btw, for some reason this discussion suddenly is about GPL, whereas 
FluidSynth is released under LGPL. Could we stay on topic by restricting 
us to discussing LGPL instead of GPL?

(This section also exists in LGPL, so the question is still relevant.)

> In GPLv2 it's this:
>
> "However, as a
>   special exception, the source code distributed need not include
>   anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
>   form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the
>   operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
>   itself accompanies the executable."
>
> An application which relied on some proprietary compiler that was not
> covered by this clause would not be distributable under the GPL (which
> is fairly obvious, because otherwise it would be very easy to work
> around the GPL by putting all your proprietary changes into the
> compiler).

There is a problem with the section in itself, as it indicates that a 
compiler is a major component of an operating system. For the Windows 
platform in particular, a lot of different compilers exist.

For iOS, I think we can count XCode as being such a major component. The 
problem for me is with the input to the code signing tool, with requires 
an Apple subscription fee.

// David