[Developers] ADMB-IDE licensing

[John Sibert]

If you are distributing Emacs and GCC or any other GPL product, you are 
obliged to license the whole thing as GPL, regardless of how anything 
else is licensed. And your users may also be obliged to release whatever 
they create with your software under a GPL license.

That is why many people dislike GPL and why we chose BSD for ADMB. It is 
a sort of religious struggle in the open source software world. So I 
would hope that you could find a way to release your package under BSD also.

You might want to verify the licenses on GCC and Emacs. As I recall, GCC 
is released under LGPL (Lesser Gnu Public License). The LGPL may be less 
restrictive than GPL, but the question has apparently never been brought 
before a (United States) court.

My advice would be not to include anything in your package distributed 
under GPL. LGPL may be OK. So please check it.

John

Arni Magnusson wrote:
> Apologies for the frequent mailing, but I'd like to ask for your 
> opinion/advice regarding the ADMB-IDE I'm about to release. Should I 
> use BSD, GPL, no license, or something else?
>
> It consists of five components:
>
> ADMB (BSD)
> GCC (GPL)
> Emacs (GPL)
> admb-mode.el (Arni)
> .emacs (Arni)
>
> I'm using Inno for packaging, and this IDE will probably be helpful 
> for many Windows and Linux users. So what licensing option do you 
> think is best for this bundle? My initial idea was no mentioning of 
> licenses, but I'm not sure if that might get me into trouble.
>
> I'm using ADMB, GCC, and Emacs without changing them, and each of them 
> comes with their own license.txt things, found in their corresponding 
> directories.
>
> Thanks for your help,
>
> Arni
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