Assistance/advice in choosing a license for POV-Ray 4.0

[Chris Cason]

Martin Konold wrote:
> IANAL but linking is not a term of copyright. The main point is if it is a 
> derivative work.

Now that you mention it that's a really good point. And I do see the
license refers to it that way too.

So the question is - does dynamic linking result in a derivative work ?
It seems to me that the answer must be 'no'. (If it were 'yes' it would
raise interesting questions on the Windows platform, where it is common
to have third-party libraries hooked into the OS in such a way as to
cause your app to unknowingly load them).

If it is 'no' then it would be possible for e.g. a LGPL'd library built
as a .so or .dll to be shipped with a commercial app with no requirement
on the vendor to do anything beyond the bare minimum required for
distribution. (From the LGPL's point of view it seems that's OK since as
a shared object the vendor's binary is already in a form that allows the
LGPL'd library to be rebuilt or replaced).

Nevertheless it appears to me that if a commercial app dynamically links
with the library there is no effective requirement for notification
within the primary app (in the standard copyright box for example) to the
end user that the primary executable uses an LGPL'd library.

-- Chris