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Re:BMW Australia Refusing to Comply with Terms of GNU Public... by mh8h on Thursday March 03, 2016 @11:10AM (#11217739)
If you need to link your code against some GPL code, then your code is GPL. But in most cases, a program that runs in a Linux environment doesn't need to link against any GPL libraries.
Re:BMW Australia Refusing to Comply with Terms of GNU Public... by jamiesonbecker on Thursday March 03, 2016 @11:27AM (#11217875)
Because of this, libraries are frequently licensed under the Lesser GPL instead, which does permit linking without causing the resultant work from becoming GPL'ed itself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_Lice...

As you point out, linking code against GPL'ed code or libraries essentially merges them and makes the end result GPL'ed as well.