Legal Issues of Distribution

[anonymous23323124]

Someone asked me to provide a prebuilt version of the SFML 2.0 binaries on my site because they were having difficulty using CMake and Make as I suggested. I know SFML itself is under the zlib license, so I can do whatever I like with it provided I leave the license there.

On the other hand, libraries used by it are licensed under various other licenses, e.g. LPGL, BSD, MIT, GPL and public domain (not exactly a license, I suppose...)

In order to generate traffic for my site, I thought I would ask people to subscribe to get a link to these binaries. However, would distributing them in a closed way such as that violate GPL style licenses, or is it fine if no money is transferred.

These third party libraries are of course already in binary form (static and dynamic), except for the header files.

Thanks

[1yR4jE8b]

I think you're fine, I'm no lawyer though. As long as you are providing the license, the location where you got the source for the binaries, and aren't distributing any derivative works under a closed license you should be fine.

The developpers of the XChat IRC client actually change money for their Windows client --- and it's still open source.

[anonymous23323124]

I didn't get the source for the binaries. I just downloaded the SFML 2.0 source. It comes with binaries prebuilt for the external libraries and some header files. The header files do actually have some form of license inside them, so maybe that's sufficient?

[S6k9GNh0]

Yeah, I use pchat or just compile xchat myself for windows until I get a homebrew up and running. :D

EDIT: Er, the point of me posting this was... to mention that xchat is free for linux and pay for use in Windows. However, there are free builds (WDK xchat, pchat, Silverex, so on). Not sure why I forgot to mention all of that.