Re: [Devel] A question concerning the freetype licence

[Antoine Leca]

Hi,

Erwin Hoegerl wrote:
> 
> I'm examine the freetype font renderer for potential use in a commercial
> project.

One thing I should emphasize on: Freetype comes with two licenses, and *you*
should elect one of them for your product.

One is the well-known GPL: if you use it, you have no problem linking the
library with any GPL or GPL-like code, *but* you should release the sources
of your code (GPL is a "sticky" OpenSource license).

The other, sometimes called the Freetype license (because it came first),
is a BSD-like license; as such, it allows you to link with any kind of
proprietary code, provided you adhere the conditions (basically, that you
acknowledge clearly that your are using Freetype as font engine).

However, using this latter license, you cannot legally link with some GPL
library *and* pretend to keep your own code secret. This is the basic reason
why we added the choice between both licenses.


 
> I' dealing with the following configuration: A Linux-system with installed
> freetype library as provided
> by freetype.org or the linux distribution, dynamically linked by the
> application, without any modification in the freetype library.
> The application itself is part of an embedded, proprietary machine control
> system.
> The application will not be distributed as stand-alone program.

Unless you forecast to distribute the code of your own application (which
I doubt), you then are required to use the second license, the Freetype one.
Which effectively means that you should proeminently acknowledge the use
of Freetype in your product! (you can also give us the URL of your product
for us to include in your web pages, but that is not a requirement ;-)).

Using the GPL license _and_ failing to release your code would break
the conditions of the GPL. Note that the use of dynamic links do not matter
(the lawyers that wrote the GPL do know about dynamic linking ;-)).
The real problem is not with Freetype, BTW, but rather that you can't link
(even dynamicaly) your application with any GPL-only library.
Using Linux is not a problem, OTOH.

 
Regards,

Antoine