Mesa3d for commercial programs?

[mowsala]

Hello all,
Apologies if this is a stupid or obvious question, but would any OpenGL applications written for Linux using Mesa3d have to be distributed freely? I know that Mesa3d uses a free licence requiring that:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Since somebody writing an OpenGL program using Mesa3d would both include the header file and link against the library at runtime, it seems to me that any application using it would have to include the free licence.
On the other hand I had the idea that several commercial Linux games use Mesa3d.
Can anybody clarify this to me? :confused:
Thanks!

[Stephen A]

IANAL, but you are not actually distributing the Mesa headers or source code. Were you to distribute Mesa along with your program, you'd certainly have to include the license. However, the runtime library is preinstalled on the user's machine, so this becomes the distro's responsibility, not yours.

You might wish to consult a lawyer specializing in copyright/licensing issues. Alternatively, try asking the Mesa developers directly.

[mowsala]

Thanks, that makes sense. I suppose since the header file consists only of variables to help link the function calls in my program to the static library, and no actual code as such, having the header included in the compilation of the execuatble shouldn't be a problem. And thanks for the very quick reply, this forum is great!