Re: [Plib-devel] Creating shared libs or plib under Linux

[Fay J. F Dr C. U. AFSEO/SK <joh...@eg...>]

Folks,

	To Hans de Goede, hello and welcome to the PLIB community.  I am
also relatively active in PLIB, particularly the PUI part of it.

	Yes, PLIB is licensed under the LGPL, but this does not mean that
you can't build commercial games with it.  To the best of my knowledge, you
only need to submit your code to the community (make it open-source under
LGPL) is if you modify the _source code_ of PLIB.  Using the object
libraries in your executable does not count and you can keep your
application source closed.

	Steve Baker decided to make PLIB statically linked, and only
statically linked, so that game executables would be self-contained rather
than having to link at runtime to half a dozen libraries.  He made that
decision a decade ago, however, and you might want to ask if he wants to
reconsider.

John F. Fay
Technical Fellow, Jacobs/Sverdrup TEAS Group
850-883-1284
joh...@eg...
 
-----Original Message-----
From: pli...@li...
[mailto:pli...@li...] On Behalf Of Hans de Goede
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 3:58 PM
To: PLIB Developers
Subject: Re: [Plib-devel] Creating shared libs or plib under Linux



Bram Stolk wrote:
> I believe that it was Steve Baker's intention to do static only, to 
> avoid issues with incompatibilities.
> 
> Basically, static libs are more foolproof.
> 

Actually static libs are a very good ways to keep being bitten by old bugs.
What happens when a static lib gets a bugfix? Either all packages build
against the previous version must be rebuild, or they keep the bug.

> Then again, is plib LGPL?
> If so, you cannot create a commercial game with plib and use a static 
> lib. LGPL requires dynamic libs.
> 

Yes PLIB is LGPL, but that is a rather black and white explanation of the
LGPL (I'm not saying its wrong though).

But you seem to be the most active plib developer at the moment, are you
interested in a patch adding sharedlib support. (Notice this will require
that you keep the ABI to plib stable between major releases.
Expanidng is ok, changing not. See my fullscreen patch as an example how you
can safely expand the ABI (99% == API)).

Regards,

Hans


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