Frequently Asked Questions about Harbour : About Harbour : Will my applications be affected by the GPL?
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2.13. Will my applications be affected by the GPL?

No, the Harbour exception seeks to ensure that, when you build an application with Harbour, compiling with the Harbour compiler and linking against the HVM and RTL, your rights to licence your own code are not in any way affected.

Harbour's licence is there to try and protect the freedom offered by the Harbour developers. Harbour's licence isn't there to try and force you to choose a specific licence.

Be assured that it isn't the intention of the Harbour developers that your applications will have to be released as free software. Supporting free software would be the right thing to do but the Harbour developers have decided not to insist on this; we think it is more useful in this situation to set up Harbour's license so that it does not make any conditions on the status of your work that was built with and against Harbour.

As always, don't take anyone else's word for this stuff, when in doubt, read the licence. If you're still in doubt pay someone who knows what they are doing to read the licence for you. Hopefully you do this with licences for your other development tools, Harbour is no different, it has a licence that you need to understand.


Frequently Asked Questions about Harbour : About Harbour : Will my applications be affected by the GPL?
Previous: So why don't you use the LGPL?
Next: Helping develop Harbour