RE: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to gstep, aga in on Win NT?

[Mike Llewellyn]

Ah, thanks for the clarification!
It sounds like it is at least worth a few days closer look.
Also need to get MSYS if it will be better for the documentation.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Frith-Macdonald [mailto:richard@brainstorm.co.uk]
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 12:12 PM
> To: Mike Llewellyn
> Cc: 'discuss-gnustep@gnu.org'
> Subject: Re: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to
> gstep, aga in on Win NT?
>
>
>
> On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 11:42 AM, Mike Llewellyn wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Many thanks for the pointers.
> >
> > On another issue, would be v. interested in your view;
> >
> > My situation is this;
> > We are selling a system that includes custom hardware and
> supporting
> > software. Part of the software is written in ObjC (WO 4.01,
> NT), and at
> > the moment we are obliged to buy a full WO Developer
> license from Apple
> > each time we sell to a customer.
> >
> > As you can imagine this is less than ideal.
> >
> > I have a limited block of time to rewrite the software such
> that we do
> > not have to pay any license fee. I have a number of
> options, including
> > MS C++, some kind of Java, perhaps MS .NET, and of course one of
> > libFoundation, gstep-base, or even the Darwin
> Foundation-type libraries.
> >
> > My natural preference would be an Objective-C based solution, since
> > that is my main programming background and because it still
> seems to be
> > a superior language. It should, in theory, also be the simplest and
> > most rapid solution.
> >
> > However, reading through the GPL I'm not convinced that it
> does suit my
> > situation to use gstep, since I am not in a position to be able to
> > publish source code to the software, as it appears the license will
> > require me to do.
>
> GNUstep (the development libraries etc) is *NOT* GPL'd ... it's LGPL,
> which is quite another thing!
> The LGPL specifically permits you to link with the libraries without
> distributing your source
> code, but if you change/fix the libraries themselves, you
> need to make
> those changes (and just those
> changes) available as source.
>
> Some tools and applications built using the GNUstep libraries
> are GPL'd,
> but that doesn't mean you need
> to release your source code any more than using GNU/Linux or
> using gcc
> does.
>
> Cygwin is GPL, but MSYS is not ... so if you want to write 'safe'
> proprietory software (ie not need
> to distribute the source code for that software), then you should
> probably use GNUstep with MINGW/MSYS
> (though it *is* quite possible to develop on Cygwin without including
> the cygwin runtime in your code).
>