Zeo Developer Terms of Use

[David Woolley]

Chris Travers wrote:
> IANAL, but I don't see what the problem is.  We already have programs
> like NDIS-wrapper, the nVidia driver wrappers, etc.   However, most of
> these use the GPL v2, not the GPL v3 and there are differences there
> which may affect things.

Whilst currently they don't charge for developer licences, they reserve 
the right to change the licence conditions in a way that affects code 
already in the field.

Normally, where proprietary software has a fee for developer licences, 
but allows royalty free binary distribution, there is an explicit clause 
forbidding the creation of such wrappers.  I would expect Zeo to add one 
if they started charging developers.

The other risk area with such an arrangement, is that it is possible 
that one couldn't create an interface specification for the wrapper that 
wasn't a derivative work of that of the library.  That gets into more 
borderline areas.

> 
> The thing to think about here is that by releasing a program under the
> GPL with a linking exception, it seems to me that what you are
> encouraging is for someone to come up with ways to take your program
> and replace the closed-source libraries eventually with open source
> ones.  Zeo will probably never do this, of course.

And they will probably never release the programming model for the hardware.
> 
>
-- 
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.