[BRLTTY] Commercial license

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2016, Tim Heuer wrote:

> Thanks Samuel,
> 
> I do plan on distributing my program, and so using GPL software then
> requires me to distribute the source to my program as well...which I'm not
> desiring to do.  I'm sure folks may disagree that GPL prevents this, but
> that's why I pay a lawyer to answer that for me...and they have.

It looks like your lawyer isn't very familiar or experienced with 
matters related to the GPL, and therefore gave you the safest answer 
they could think of.

Commercial and/or proprietary software may coexist with GPL software as 
long as you follow some rules. To interpret that license properly, your 
lawyer must understand the difference between software linking, software 
bundling, software distribution, what is derived work and what is not in 
a software context, etc.

This is well explained here:
https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-guide.html

As to your original question: there is currently no alternative 
licensing for BRLTTY other than the GPL and probably never will be.

However, if you provide more details about the way you intended BRLTTY 
to be used along with your own application, then the BRLTTY copyright 
holders who are most likely monitoring this mailing list might be able 
to tell you if your use of BRLTTY respects the license they chose for 
their code, and suggest possible ways to be compliant otherwise, without 
forcing you to release your own code.


Nicolas