[sword-devel] Question about Public Domain

[Chris Little]

Ben Morgan wrote:
> I thought it was the whole glob of the application that had to be able 
> to be licensed under the GPL? An individual component of my application 
> can be released under another license.

Ok, I think I know what you're getting at. Assuming that you want to use 
a GPL library (e.g. Sword), other individual components can be released 
under any GPL compatible license, provided that the overall project is 
GPL licensed (not GPL compatible, but GPLv2 specifically).

BibleCS & Xiphos are in this situation because they use Sword (GPL v2) 
and also ICU (BSD 2-clause), and the resulting front end in both cases 
is GPL v2.

It would be possible to write non-GPL components to a front end and 
incorporate them into a GPL front end, but I don't believe it would be 
possible to make the front end itself non-GPL because it is itself a 
derivative work of all libraries that it links (since you would have to 
use the GPL header files).

--Chris