[OpenBabel-scripting] Windows DLLs

[Chris M. <c.m...@ga...>]

Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
> On Feb 1, 2007, at 4:26 PM, Noel O'Boyle wrote:
> 
>> I'm glad to hear that you have solved the problem. We will release new
>> versions of OpenBabelGUI and openbabel-python which will include these
>> DLLs as described here (thanks to Chris for sorting this out):
>> http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=164465&SiteID=1
> 
> I noticed these just showed up in the SVN tree -- but are these  
> really legal to distribute under the GPL? I have mixed feelings about  
> distributing a pile of binaries (DLLs) in the SVN tree in general.  
> But there's no clear copyright on the page you mentioned, which  
> worries me.

Microsoft give a licence to distribute these DLL files with an 
application. To see what is normally done I looked at Tortoise SVN, a 
GPL Windows project. Tortoise distributes them, but seems to prepare 
their Windows installer with tools in Visual Studio that incorporates 
the DLLs automatically. The free version of Visual Studio that we use 
lacks these tools and the installer is prepared using the open source 
program NSIS. Noel put the script that NSIS uses on SVN; I thought that, 
for completeness, the DLLs that will be distributed in the installer 
package should be there too.

But I see that it would avoid much tedious discussion on licences to 
keep the DLLs only on Windows machines with Visual Studio installed, so 
I have removed them from SVN (as far as is posible). They will of course 
be included in the Windows binary installer that is distributed.

Chris