## 6 SANE and Commercial Applications/Drivers

What's our position with respect to commercial SANE drivers or applications? In the spirit of the GNU Public License, it is preferrable to have the source for SANE programs available. However, it is permissible to write a dynamically loaded, commercial SANE driver on Linux and other platforms that support dynamic loading. (Drivers are always dynamically loaded, so this doesn't cause any extra work.) By the same token, it is also proper to write a commercial application that links with the libsane.so shared library. The basic ideas supporting this position are:

1. Healthy competition between commercial and free programs is an asset, not a liability.

2. The more wide-spread use SANE finds, the better for the Linux/Unix community.