Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] licenses and static and dynamic libraries

[Tony Theodore]

On 02/04/2013, at 10:02 PM, LM <address@hidden> wrote:

> The topic came up before regarding static versus dynamic linking and how that 
> might affect licensing issues.  Was trying to think of some examples, but 
> couldn't remember specifics at the time.
> 
> Ran across one yesterday where static and dynamic linking are treated 
> differently by the license.  If you supply all the source, it shouldn't be an 
> issue.

This is our target audience (free software developers) so hopefully it isn't a 
issue in practice.

> However, libgmp is typically linked with the mingw compiler,

It's required to build gcc and in the case of cross-compiling, isn't an issue. 
You could theoretically use the toolchain (binutils, gcc, mingw.org 
headers/runtime) [1] to produce proprietary software, it's not going to link 
the native libgmp into the target(host) binaries. Using the libgmp package 
however, will require compliance with the licence.

Cheers,

Tony

[1] This is probably not the case with mingw-w64 where parts of it are under 
the GPL and will be in the target binaries. The mingw.org project has a public 
domain licence.