I am, too, not a lawyer, but: The GPL is meant to ensure exactly what you plan to do doesn't happen: If you distribute a program based on librtlsdr, the person receiving your software has a right to its source code. Dynamically linking usually doesn't change that fact; that's interaction directly between machine code through shared state/memory.
Best regards, Marcus
On Tue, 2019-04-16 at 07:36 -0400, Richard Frye wrote:
I want to write a program that is for sale without releasing all of the source code. Some of it is fine but parts are proprietary. Does it matter if I dynamically link the rtlsdr library?
-Richard
On Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 8:45 PM Greg Troxel gdt@lexort.com wrote:
Richard Frye richard@codingstudios.com writes:
If I write software that uses the rtlsdr library that is already installed on the computer, does my software also have to be opensource?
IANAL, TINLA.
rtl-sdr and osmo-sdr both appear to be GNU GPLv2.
The standard interpretation is that if you create a derived work by writing a program that uses those libraries, then distributing that derived work requires permission from the copyright holders of the used libraries. And, that permission is only available if you license your work under the same license, GPLv2. That is the point of the license.
If you want to write software and not distribute it at all, that's another matter, and the standard interpetation is that this is ok.
What are you trying to write, and what are you thinking about for licensing, other than GPLv2?