Hi I'm new to all this legal stuff... Basically we've created a game production program. The engine used in the produced games utilises OpenAL (which is great) under the LGPL, but what about the licensing stuff? Ideally we'd want to be able to produce stand alone exes without having to have a seperate text file containing the license, can we do this? When the game is first run on a machine do we have to say that its using openal and pop up a license agreement box? Anyway if anyone could point me to a document explaining the implications of LGPL that would be great... Thanks

can anyone help?

You will get a better response if you provide links to whatever license it is you are talking about. When I went to search for LGPL it threw up Lesser GPL and Library GPL. Didn't know which you were talking abou so my search stops there.

If you provide more information I expect someone will be able to help.

I don't have anything *official*, but I did ask this question before, so you can take a look at that post for a little more info on this subject.

Quote: Ideally we'd want to be able to produce stand alone exes without having to have a seperate text file containing the license, can we do this?

I highly doubt it. If your .exe's use OpenAL, then you must have that license with them, but I am not expert so you will need to look more into that specific condition.

Quote: When the game is first run on a machine do we have to say that its using openal and pop up a license agreement box?

No, all you have to do is have the license with the product as well as link dynamically to the OpenAL libraries. You do not have to advertise OpenAL, although it would be nice [smile]

Thanks a load!
So basically when the game is distributed there need to be 4 files:
Game.exe
OpenAl.dll
license.txt
GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.txt (copied exactly from http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt)

When its run must I say, "This program uses OpenAL under the terms of the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE"?

Am I understanding it correctly?

Cheers

Quote: When its run must I say, "This program uses OpenAL under the terms of the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE"?

I strongly do not think so since you have included the license with the .exe. You are not required to say it uses OpenGL under those terms because you have included the license itself to which your engine is distributed on.

Everything else is great that you have said! I mean you can show an image of the OpenAL logo just for their sake, you know? But you do not have to.

Cheers
Thanks for spending time to help me out

Quote: Original post by lincsimp
Cheers
Thanks for spending time to help me out

No problem! All of that licensing stuff can be kind of confusing, but it is very important! I know I will be doing some more reading up on it because I just made a OpenAL library that we may license out [smile]. You may want to find a legal friend if possible and go over everything one more time if possible just to be 100% sure. I don't think you have anything to worry with if you follow the OpenAL stuff, but for the other stuff with the "license" of your engine.

I know the GPL explicitly states that a licensee *must not* require an in-program splash-screen, about box, etc... for credits and I imagine the LGPL would have a similar clause. The technical reason is that it makes command-line programs impractical and you can have license incompatibilities where several products demand to be the first splash-screen, or have splash-screens ad nauseum as found in EverQuest II.