Distribution and Licensing
Like Free Pascal, Lazarus is free software. Different portions are distributed under different free software licenses, including GPL, LGPL, MPL, and a modified version of LGPL.
Specifically, the LCL, which is statically built into the produced executables, is licensed under a modified version of the LGPL, granting extra permissions to allow it to be statically built into the produced software, including proprietary ones.
Note that installing a design-time package is equivalent to linking to the IDE. Thus, distributing the Lazarus IDE with a GPL-incompatible design-time package (e.g. the JEDI packages, which are licensed under the Mozilla Public License) pre-installed would cause a license violation. This does not prohibit proprietary packages from being developed with Lazarus, though.
Lazarus is officially distributed via Sourceforge.
Read more about this topic: Lazarus (IDE)
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)