Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Request for OSS support

[Martin Lambers]

Hi!

On Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:43:24 -0500, LM wrote:
> You'd have to check the specific licensing involved, but there are
> some libraries, you
> can't legally statically link to certain types of applications without
> violating the
> licenses.  So, dynamic linking opens up some possibilities that static
> linking can't
> in those situations.

Yes, but I believe this is limited to proprietary applications that
want to use LGPL libraries. In that case, to enable the user to replace
LGPL libraries as required by the license, you must use them as dynamic
libraries.

For free software applications, this restriction does not apply, since
the user can rebuild the whole application and can therefore replace
any code even with static linking.

A similar argument is true for dynamic plugins: you only need those if
the application is proprietary so that you can build plugins using only
a public interface of the application, but not its complete source code.
For free software applications, you can just link all plugins
statically, because a user can just rebuild the whole thing with
whatever plugins he wishes.

> There are a few projects out there that try to offer package
> management solutions for
> Windows.  They do contend with issues like software updates and
> security fixes.

Yes, but none of them has any significant number of users as far as I
know. So you cannot expect your users to use one of these, and therefore
you need to ship all dependencies yourself.

Martin