Re: [Bug-XBoard] WinBoard for JFW

[Eric Mullins]

h.g. muller wrote:
> I finally succumbed to persistent pressure to have a look at WinBoard 
> 4.0.2 for JFW,
> to fix the broken ICS support. It seems I have succeeded in doing 
> this. I still want to
> apply a patch to make it speak the thinking output in a useful way, 
> when showThinking
> is on (e.g. in analysis mode).
>
> My question now is this:
>
> The version I downloaded from Tim's website (source package) went 
> accompanied by a
> file jfwapi32.dll. It was not clear to me where this file came from, 
> and what its license
> situation is. there was no source code for this file, so I suppose it 
> is not GPL'd. I could
> not find anything about it in the copyright notice included in the 
> package.
>
> When we are going to distribute my fixed version, would it be allowed 
> to redistribute
> this jfwapi32.dll with it?
I'm not a GPL expert, but I think if you explicitly link with the DLL, 
then it must be open source.  Maybe it's safe to link at runtime using 
LoadLibrary() and GetProcAddress() to access the API calls, particularly 
since it is just providing extra accessibility features not needed for 
winboard to function.

In any event, I'm not in favor of shipping that DLL.  People running the 
JAWS software would already have it, so nobody else needs it.