cfix cfix 1.1 goes LGPL

cfix 1.0 had been licensed under the GNU General Public License. One of the characteristics of the GPL is that it disallows proprietary binaries to be linked against GPL-licensed binaries.

In the context of cfix, linking is quite a concern – after all, every test-DLL has to be linked against cfix.dll. As cfix.dll is GPL-licensed, this means that it would be illegal to redistribute the test-DLL, along with the cfix test runner, commercially. Granted, it is rather uncommon to redistribute testing code with your proprietary software – however, as it turned out, this case exists.

For this reason, cfix 1.1 switches over to the slightly more liberal GNU Lesser General Public License. The LGPL explicitly allows proprietary binaries to link against LGPL-licensed binaries. As such, redistributing your cfix test-DLLs will not be an issue any more.

Any opinions expressed on this blog are Johannes' own. Refer to the respective vendor’s product documentation for authoritative information.
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