I’m posting this question here because I could find no information about AppImages and licensing considerations of the dependencies stored in the image.
I have created an AppImage of a commercial closed source application which utilizes GTK+ and associated dependencies. To my knowledge most of these library dependencies are at least as permissible as LGPL. With the understanding that any advice given is not “proper legal advice”, does anyone have any tips or pointers in regards to any special potential licensing issues with bundling binary libraries and assets in an AppImage?
From my understanding of how AppImage works, it is a single file consisting of an executable stub combined with an iso image. This seems to suggest that the bundled dependencies could be considered to not be directly linked into the commercial application, but more analogous to a file system and therefore the standard considerations would apply. The code of the AppImage application stub would fall under its license, which seems commercial and GPL/LGPL friendly. It would seem to therefore be permissible to have the commercial application inside of the AppImage link against LGPL libraries (as is normally the case), provided the rest of the licensing requirements are met (source code distributed publicly, link-able binary objects of commercial application made available, etc).
I suspect this is a reasonable interpretation that AppImages are more like a filesystem, rather than a fully linked executable. Please let me know if this analogy seems erroneous.