How To Break The GPL
Jonathan Marks
jon.marks at novatek.co.nz
Sat Mar 4 22:17:40 UTC 2000
Hi People.
Attempting to follow the Alice / Trent thread here:
1. Alice's software requires Trent's library to work; much like a car needs
wheels to work. A manufacturer of cars could choose to supply you the vehicle
without wheels and give you the option to get the wheels from the wheel
manufacturer. Alice's choice here (clearly in an attempt to avoid licensing
issues) is not to supply Trent's library, but give end user the opportunity to
pick up the library from Trent's web site. From my understanding of the GPL,
Alice's work is derived from Trent's as Alice's *intent* is for her software to
work with Trent's library. Alice does not get around the licensing issue she
is attempting to avoid, and Trent's GPL is (perhaps unnecessarily) restricting
Alice's intended distribution of her software. Is this appropriate reasoning?
2. Perhaps the word "Derived" is inappropriate to this licensing situation. A
distinction I have held for some time is: If a body of software has it's
direct funcionality added to, modified or changed, then the resulting outcome
should become part of the body of software in terms of copyright and licensing.
(Additional copyright notices permissible for the contributions). On the other
hand, if use is made of the body of software to create other distinctly
different software, then the resulting software should not be part of the body
of software, although consideration for use of the body of software may be
appropriate.
An example. If Bob develops an Opensource (perhaps GPL) Widget Library that
Tracy uses in her General Ledger(commercial proprietary) application; it is
hard for me to concede that Tracy's GL app is derived from the Widget Library.
However from my read of the GPL this will be the case. If a hypothetical
Opensource license had "Terms of Use of Direct Functionality" and "Terms of
modification (addion, deletion, changes)to Direct Functionality" could we not
better address this issue. That is Bob could stipulate in Terms of Use, things
like: displaying copyright, must be supplied with source, considerations, etc..
In Terms of Modification, it could be stated that all modification remain part
of the body of software, etc.
This is one of the reasons I have been struggling with the GPL, and other Open
Source licenses. The square term "Derived", is being forced through a round
hole. Could this be the case?
Regards
Jonathan
Anything free is worth what you pay for it.
Jonathan Marks, http://www.novatek.co.nz
11360 Clipper Court, Richmond, B.C. V73 4M3, Canada
Tel:(604) 274-2277, (604) 805-4035. Fax: (707) 221-3689
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