2026-09-17 08:19 UTC
For your example with Steam that would be perfectly fine to release under GPL, unless you signed an NDA to access Steams APIs or are actually including code provided by Valve under an incompatible license. Otherwise you couldn’t have GPL licensed software running on Windows using the Win32 APIs. What you can’t have is mixing code with incompatible licenses, but linking is fine.
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@thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 2026-09-17 08:29
I know for a fact that this is one of the major pain points, why they can’t or want to publish on Steam. There are games or programs with GPL code on Steam, but they do not make use of those features, because it would mean mixing incompatible licensed code (Steamworkshop) with your games code (GPL). I don’t know if things have changed, but I know in the past that was an issue. Also dynamic linking is fine, not compile time linking. Those are two different things. I did not say dynamic linking is a problem.