For an open source project, is it legal and acceptable to link to commercial libraries?For example, an open source application I'm involved in would benefit from using commercial 3rd party user interface library.
For an open source project, is it legal and acceptable to link to commercial libraries?
open source;third party libraries;commercial
Although legality might be something to consider, the bigger question here is related to practicality and usefulness (and, as you said, acceptability).If you release your product as open source, but no one can use it without purchasing some commercial libraries, how useful is your product going to be? Unless your target audience already has this commercial library installed for some other purpose, I highly doubt that they would buy it just to use your application.So legality aside, I don't think potential users will consider this acceptable behavior.