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I own a project called Luminol currently licensed under GPlv3 I'd like to distribute on Steam. If possible, I'd like to keep Luminol as GPLv3, mainly to ensure modifications of Luminol are public. I've benefitted from that clause personally before so I have very strong feelings about getting rid it.

I'm hoping to have the source code public- free for anyone to compile, Aseprite style- and lock the Steam integration behind a feature flag, so the project isn't useless and can be compiled as DRM free.

To do this though, I'd need to link against a proprietary library (steamworks), and GPL doesn't allow that, for reasons I understand and generally agree with. That's the main reason why I want to put it behind a feature gate- it doesn't make the source code entirely useless on its own and sort of keeps in the spirit of GPL.

I've done a bit of searching around, and nothing seems to fit exactly what I'm doing- a lot of it is about linking proprietary code against GPL code, not the other way around. The few cases I have found were doused in a lot of legalese I have trouble understanding, and generally are about forks of gpl code, I think?

What can I do about this?

Speak2Erase
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    Welcome! The relevant GPL FAQ item for this particular case is https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs -- there is probably a good Q&A about this already on this site (try searching for GPL exception here), but I don't know the best one just at the moment. – apsillers Jul 11 '23 at 13:54
  • Thanks! That definitely helps. The legalese in the FAQ is a little confusing to me though, do you think you could explain some of it? – Speak2Erase Jul 11 '23 at 14:20
  • Here's a pretty similar Q&A (maybe similar enough to close this as a duplicate?) that I've answered in the past: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/q/2233/50 – apsillers Jul 11 '23 at 15:41
  • @Speak2Erase could you let us know either that apsiller's linked post answers your own questions as well, or what in your original question remains to be answered? – MadHatter Jul 12 '23 at 06:34
  • Where would I put the license notice mentioned in https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs? – Speak2Erase Jul 13 '23 at 05:18

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