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by zanny 1806 days ago
> to use code for good with commercial interests

You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.

1 comments

I disagree with "have to publish source on anything it touches" . Electronic Arts used WebKit in multiple games and they only had to share changes they did to it, not the source codes for all their games.

As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.

WebKit is LGPL though, not GPL, and it was built as a specially maintained dynamic library specifically to avoid having to publish the source code for the whole game.
Webkit is LGPL, not GPL - not having to share linked code is exactly the main difference between these licenses.
WebKit is a mixture of LGPL and BSD, not pure GPL.