Does Shareware X-Chat for Windows Violate the GPL?

pc486 writes "The popular IRC client X-Chat has recently come under criticism as to whether or not the new shareware Windows version of the IRC client violates the GPL. All sorts of points are being persued, such as pure GPL Gettext linking, gtk translation worries, copyright issues, who's code is what and more." This is a complicated tale of GPL licensing, so beware.

Comments

Id don't think it breaks the GPL

[arcanumas]

I saw this yesterday and i was wondering the same thing.
But as far as i can tell, they are only selling the "binary' version of X-chat for windows.

On the page it says that you are free to download the source code.

So how is this any different from RedHat and others?

They can release their own code however they like

[Jan-Pascal]

Sure, They can release their own code however they like, but not other people's code they use. That's exactly what the GPL is for: to prevent community work to be taken into a proprietary product and thus depriving the community from the enhancements made to its own code.

Interesting

[Moth7]

Given that it's shareware with a 30 day binary license, does this mean that since it's sourcecode is GPLd, they must provide the source to the code which enforces the 30 day trial? Strictly udner the GPL this should happen, but it would be suicide if someone could just come along, request the source and use it to break the crippleware timer.
I don't see any way how one could lock a user out after 30 days without it being breakable from seeing the sourcecode.

Go ChatZilla !

[CdBee]

I hope that if X-Chat is going to have troubles with the GPL it will encourage more developers to help with Mozilla's ChatZilla.

With Mozilla Calendar (Sunbird), Browser (Firefox) and Mail (Thunderbird) already spun off into interesting projects in various stages of development, how long can it be until we have a trule OSS IRC client from them as well?

I've been using iChat for a year and its fine for IRC use already.