remove GHOST to allow non GPL usage?

[ofTheo]

just wondering how much Ghost was being used in ofxFenster and how hard it would be to replace it with something else.
because Ghost is GPL it makes ofxFenster GPL and in turn makes any project that uses ofxFenster GPL.

this means that projects that use ofxFenster would have to publish under GPL and this would limit the types of projects ofxFenster could be used in.

anyway I also ask because we might see ofxFenster or something based off of it become the default windowing environment for OF down the line and OF doesn't use GPL code in the core.

[benben]

first of all: @underdoeg is away for about six weeks, so we have to wait until he is back.

I don't really know how hard it would be to change ghost with something else.
I know that underdoeg made some changes to the ghost lib.

Also there is a lack of libs which are as good as ghost but with a less restictive license. Do you know some good alternatives?

I totally understand the problem with the GPL, so this is a really bad problem :(

[underdoeg]

Thanks @benben

It wouldn't be a big problem to change the underlying window manager. While developing ofxFenster I checked out so many managers, that I tried to keep the code as independent as possible. (but didn't put focus on it...)

But from all managers I tried GHOST seemed to be the most up to date and flexible one that didn't also include a GUI toolkit. And AFAIK none of them used the MIT licence.

I'd love to see a more flexible windowing system to be included in the OF core and I'm sure ofxFenster will provide a good starting point. But I guess we'll have to find a different library. (maybe ask the community if anybody knows of anything) or write our own.

Writing our own may sound like too much of a challenge but maybe it would be worth it. On most systems it is actually really easy to just open windows and move them around etc... But problem is that you'd have to write it for win / mac and X11 simultaneously which makes it quite a task in maintenance. I think the only chance to get there would be with a small team where each member focuses on one OS.

Maybe starting a thread in the forums about the whole window system topic might help to collect some ideas and libraries?