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IANAL but you don't need to relicense your program to GPL just to use a GPL library. You can relicense to something that is compatible with GPL, like say the MI
by est31 5y ago
IANAL but you don't need to relicense your program to GPL just to use a GPL library. You can relicense to something that is compatible with GPL, like say the MIT license. Then the combined form has to be distributed under GPL terms. But when you one day replace the library with something not under GPL, you can distribute combined forms of those under MIT.
- nextaccountic 5y agoYes, that's true. I mean the whole work to be under GPL. The exact terms of your own code is less important, as long as it is GPL compatible.
- kazinator 5y agoThat is correct. If you want to redistribute a mixture of different program components as one program, all the pieces have to have licenses that are compatible. If any of them are GPL, then the whole thing will be GPL; all the other licenses have to be cool with being part of a whole that carries a GPL umbrella license. MIT and BSD pieces are this way.
- greyivy 5y agoThis must be why so many proprietary apps require you to manually download FFmpeg binaries during runtime. Thanks for the explanation!