> This makes no sense... This effectively means that MSVC is useless as no
> one can distribute binaries build with it.....
The things that triggered me are 2 things I read in readme's of other packages:
1) in README.win32 of glib-2.19 (LGPL), one can read
===
Presumably, if compiled with MSVC.NET, it also works with MSVCR70.DLL. Please note that it's dubious if you would be allowed by
the license to distrubute a GLib linked to MSVCR70.DLL, as it is not part of the operating system, but of the MSVC product. MSVCRT.DLL is part of Windows.
===
2) in README.wo32 of gettext-0.15 (GPL), one can read
===
Note that binaries created with MSVC 7.0 should not be distributed: They depend on a closed-source library 'msvcr70.dll' which is not normally part of a Woe32 installation. You cannot distribute 'msvcr70.dll' with the binaries - this would be a violation of the GPL and of the Microsoft EULA. You can distribute the binaries without including 'msvcr70.dll', but this will cause problems for users that don't have this library on their system. Therefore it is not recommended. This problem does not occur with MSVC 6.0 and earlier.
===
[I'm not an expert in license...]
So, if I understand this correctly, the problem is a matter of distributing
binary packages. You can't include MS runtime libs in a binary package of
(L)GPL code. But I guess, nothing prevents you from distributing those libs
as a separate package.
> How do commercial developers deal with this?
If the problem is really a matter of combining MS runtime libs with GPL
binary code into a single package, then I don't think commercial developers
have that problem.
> Is this license restriction only on the free
> version of MSVC? If so does it go away with a commercial license? If so
> I'm for starting a charity to get you a commercial license of MSVC and
> be done with it..
I don't think this is a matter of free/commercial version of Visual Studio.
A commercial VS install also contains binary packages for redistributing the
runtime libs. I guess those packages are the same as the ones you can
download from MS web site and are covered with the same EULA.
(but thanks for the proposal... ;-)