AgeWare None wrote

Here at ageware we are in a project to make a Game IDE to make Pascal based game's with my OpenGL Graphic Engine and Toturial's. and can i use the Free Pascal to the Gameos Application, i know that it is "FREE" Pascal but i will only take monney for the other part's of the Application..?

First of all - please, send general questions
like this one to a mailing list rather than to an
e-mail address of one particular person (like
myself).

Regarding to what is allowed and what not - FPC
itself is distributed under the terms of GPL =
General Public License (see file COPYING
distributed as part of our releases for details).

To provide you with short and simple (simplified)
answer: if your product (IDE) calls external FPC
binary and you indicate that FPC is a standalone
part and is free (including complete sources), it
is OK. If you integrate FPC compiler into your
own code, it becomes a "derivative work" and thus
the complete result would automatically fall
under the GPL terms (which means among other
things that you have to provide complete sources
for your own work too). You can still sell CDs
with the compiled version (and offer paid
support, etc.), but at the same time, you must
make the sources freely available to anybody.

Hope this helps

Tomas

Tomas Hajny wrote

> Here at ageware we are in a project to make a Game IDE to make Pascal based > game's with my OpenGL Graphic Engine and Toturial's. and can i use the Free > Pascal to the Gameos Application, i know that it is "FREE" Pascal but i will > only take monney for the other part's of the Application..?

It has already being answered but I will try to make it more clear.

The answer to this is a big yes.

There is a big confusion between Free Software (Free of speech) and Free Beer. Nothing on GPL says you cannot sell GPL software.

What you cannot do in anyway is to hide the source code of the GPL software.

If your Engine isn´t GPL then you must call the compiler as a external software. This is because you cannot statically link GPL code into proprietary software.

Also, You cannot modify the source code of the compiler and then release it on any other licence other then GPL.

Tomas Hajny wrote

You can still sell CDs with the compiled version (and offer paid support, etc.), but at the same time, you must make the sources freely available to anybody.

Actually, even then you would only have to make the source available to the people that get the compiled version. You would not be able to forbid those people to redistribute the sources further though, possibly even via public websites.

That said, as Tomas explained: as long as you simply call the compiler from within your IDE and don't compile it in, your IDE is a completely separate work and you can distribute/sell it under any license and conditions you want.

Jonas