SWT Distribution

**emanuele** · 07-20-2008, 08:38 PM

Hi! I am developing a program using EclipseSDK and i choosed SWT for the GUI part of it. Does anybody knows if is possibile to use SWT even if the program is tought to have a commercial type of release? In practice i would like to sold my program.... but can i do it if using SWT and can i distribuite the archive including the SWT ddls and jars?
Hope anybody could help me
Thanks
Emanuele

**Nicholas Jordan** · 07-21-2008, 03:02 AM

Did you try reading the license?

**emanuele** · 07-21-2008, 10:57 AM

Thanks Nicholas. Yes i read the license many times, but i'm not so legally expert. I understood i can do it but.... i was searching for more confirms. bye

**Nicholas Jordan** · 07-21-2008, 06:45 PM

Originally Posted by emanuele

Thanks Nicholas. Yes i read the license many times, but i'm not so legally expert. I understood i can do it but.... i was searching for more confirms. bye

It is not something that experienced people are going to touch. People who cause licenses to be necessary are not going to take the time to read the license. In general, GPL will allow commercial use but you have to include the license. That is easily ten times larger than most apps. Other persons tend to want to have some share if their work is used commercailly, or at least the chance to decline the revenue. To be blunt, it does not matter how many times you read the license, someone somewhere can come back later and try to squeeze a few bucks - there is no shortage of horror stories.

In general, what I do is go read the code and write it myself. An idea may not be copyrighted. That does not stop the risk, it all gets around to key control. A real company in a real world does not have time for this sort of thing. If it is a big-time, major-bucks project, let trained counsel who's job it is to do this job do the job they are trained to do. If it is a small project, ususally a study, there is normally not enough in it to generate interest. Just sorta take the approach that you are in an unforseen issue arena, thus if they do not make it clear to you that you can use it in a paticular way, then getting confirmations on the open wire is not going to do you any good.

This is not a rebuttal, nor in any way styled to inform you of any issues.