OpenSource may not disallow it
David Woolley
forums at david-woolley.me.uk
Sun Mar 15 14:22:24 UTC 2009
HDE Weird wrote:
> OpenSource license. So, an OpenSource license may not disallow users
> breking the OpenSource license, like including parts of OpenSource
> code in commercial closed-source programs, if they do it using
> open-source programs. Right?
Obviously wrong, and not really worth the effort of arguing about.
Their limit in this context is that they cannot restrict the use of the
open source software as a tool in the generation of the proprietary
software, but not forming part of that software.
Even if the OSD "field of endeavour clause" were flawed in this respect,
it would, at worst affect the OSD approval of the licence, not the
actual validity of the licence, and, in practice, the OSD would be fixed
so that the GPL remained approved.
(Some Open Source Definition compliant licences do permit integration
into closed source products, though.)
--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list