This *really* needs to be cleared up, right here and now. About, 3 years ago, this was a big deal on a lot of the dev lists, as Mac Programmers (then in Cocoa) had concerns about putting GUI's on GPL'd binaries to make them easier for Mac users to use. After much discussion, arguement, weeping, moaning and gnashing of teeth, it was determined that, while not "politically correct", and in many ways doing an 'end run' around the GPL and "violating" its spirit, there was a way to wrap GPL'd binaries without exposing the code of the wrappers themselves.

You do NOT have to GPL wrapper code, if it merely runs executables. If you use the wrapper as an App launcher, you are in the clear, as long as you don't modify the binary to work with your wrapper.

This has NEVER been a GPL requirement. Specifically, if you incorporate source of a GPL'd program into your source(1), or modify gpl source(2), you have compliance requirements.

In case 1, you are required to release your source. In case (2) your are required to release the changes to the source.

I believe this really needs to be cleared up; I *know* because of this many improvements that people want to make to their wrappers are *not* being made.

It would probably be for the good of all concerned that if you have GPL'd your wrappers, you STOP work on "that version" (the GPL applies to current and previous...) and release a Non-GPL version.

This is perfectly valid and allowed. GPL proponents *hate* when that happens, btw.

Its usually more complicated, as you have to remove any GPL source and libs you code used, but in the case of these particular kinds of App Wrappers its a non-issue.

I sincerely believe that the vast majority of normal *users* will reap the benefits of this, as the coders can concentrate of putting in everything they wanted to in the first place and "raise the bar"...while hackers can tweak to thier hearts content.

-K