License questions

[Bill Moran]

I am not a lawyer.  If you're running a business you should seek professional
legal advice.  Here's my opinion/experience, however.

Socketd wrote:
> I would like to use FreeBSD to make commercial and free software. For that
 > I use a number of programs and third-party libraries (I program in C++). My
 > guess it that there is no problem with using antuja, gnome, c++ doc and other
 > programs for this, but what about the libraries? Some of them are released
 > under the BSD license, but other under GPL or LGPL.
> My question is, can I use libraries like dbconnect, common c++, gtkzthread
 > (which are all under the GPL or LGPL) to make closed-source, commercial
 > software?

Maybe.  You can do it with LGPL, but not with GPL.  Not being able to _every_
create closed-source software from GPLed stuff is a fundamental precept of
the GPL.

> Also, if I want to release software under the BSD license, does the license
 > have to be included in every file I write?

I'm not sure, but it should would be safer that way (no chance of "I didn't
get the license with this distro")  I think you should at least put in a
notification that the software is distributed under the BSD license.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com