FreeTDS Development Group

[Brian Bruns <brian AT bruns.com>]

The relevant provision of the LGPL is that your program must be able
to be relinked against a modified version of FreeTDS.  This is an
issue for commercial software, but if you are under an MIT license and
providing source code, this should not be a problem (user can relink
by recompiling).

It will however mean that, whereas under MIT somebody would be able to
take the code closed source, the downstream recipient will be likewise
obligated to either 1) make source available 2) make object files
available for relinking statically or 3) switch to dynamic linking if
they don't distribute code.

tldr; yes you can statically link but there are some caveats.

Hope this helps,

Brian

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 6:16 PM, Christos Zoulas <christos AT zoulas.com> wrote:
> On May 27,  5:33pm, ken AT metaskills.net (Ken Collins) wrote:
> -- Subject: [freetds] License Question
>
> |
> | So TinyTDS has a statically compiled/linked version of FreeTDS when we 
> distribute our gem for Windows. My project is a MIT License. What should I 
> do in my license for FreeTDS if any? Sorry, I'm really bad with licenses 
> and would appreciate any help.
> |
> |  - Ken
>
> Why don't you dynamically link to it? I think that you are on dangerous 
> ground
> by statically linking, because the functionality your gem is presenting to 
> the
> rest of the world, is the functionality provided by freetds and nothing 
> more,
> so you would end up being considered a derivative work.
>
> IANAL
>
> christos
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