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Did you know? SharpDevelop in under LGPL!
And appernatly has been this way for quite a while. I was still under the impression that it was under GPL, which meant that I couldn't make use of its components in my application, but it being LGPL, it is making stuff much easier. For those of you whom the last sentence means nothing, here is a Great OSS Licensing Debate in a two sentences: GPL is viral, LGPL is not. GPL means no traditional commercial use, LGPL allows it*.
SharpDevelop was under GPL for its 1.0 version, and I continued to think of it as GPL in its 2.0/2.1 and 3.0 versions. Now that it is under LGPL, I can make use of it, and the most interesting piece at the moment is ICSharpCode.NRefactory, which is a C# code parser. Why is this important? It means that I can now start slice & dice code in a very easy fashion. My previous example used this approach, and I think that it is great!
I can now use it to overcome annoyances in the langauge / framework, I am just afraid of ending up with Ayende# :-), so I'll probably limit it to the more interesting places, like the perf counter sample.
* Yes, it is completely wrong when you get down to the details, if you really want to understand the differences, google it, there is a host of stuff on it.
Comments
I think this happened just over a year ago. As of that time the only exception was SharpZipLib was still GPL, but with exception clauses to make it non-viral. I'm not sure if anything's changed since then.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/01/20/435999.aspx
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