Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : gswork
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 09:32 am


Joe Butler wrote:
> So, what's the reasoning behind these licences that don't allow a commercial
> (closed source) apps from using them?
>
> In once sense, if the idea behind the GPL, etc. is to benefit others, this
> is a limitation that will reduce the number of people that can actually
> benefit from it.  A closed source app is not going to open its source just
> so it can use some GPL.  If the source was allowed to be used by all,
> without the restrictions on commercial apps, that would benefit a lot more
> people, wouldn't it?

This comes up now and then, i'm sure there's a group somewhere that
disucsses licensing frequently and accurately, i'm going to guess it's
not comp.programming - but still, it's quite an interesting post.

anyway, the license itself can be read and understood if you were
seriously needing to use gpl code in your closed source application.

> You'd have commercial apps integrating GPL stuff that people would buy if
> they offered something that the free alternatives didn't offer.  You have
> all the free stuff, just as if the commercial app didn't exist (except that
> you might have fewer users due to some of them prefering the commercial
> alternative).  You'd still have the open source 'community' that could
> emulate the commercial app, if they wanted to.
>
> I think if I were producing a commercial app and wanted to use some GPL, I'd
> just write an open source wrapper around the GPL stuff and release the
> wrapper so that commercial apps were allowed to use it - the wrapper might
> be a bit of a dog to use though ;-)  Would that layer circumnavigate the
> restrictions?

hmm, well just drifting through my thoughts on what you said based
around a hypothetical commercial closed source app...

I'd have thought that if you use a gpl library, for instance, and used
it unmodified you'd just say so, and maybe produce the code on request
(or just point to the project that produced it).   If you used a
library and altered it then you would be obliged to make your
modifications open source too.

I'm not sure if the entire application which calls the library needs to
be made open source, that's sounds unrealistic because it is the
library source that's been used and altered not the rest of the app.
Imagine the consequence of using a tiny open source compression library
inside an enormous application just to compress some data and having to
turn over the whole app because of it, no one making a closed source
app would bother with it.

now if you just took the entire source to Abiword, for instance, and
changed that around a bit to produce a variant then you would need to
release source for the whole, it being a derivative of abiword.

Those are just some thoughts anyway - the actual terms of the license
are what matter.

what i would add is that it must be nearly impossible to police,
especially in gray areas - let's say you produce a nice word processor
which borrowed heavily from Abiword but was actually significantly
different - it may fall under the gpl and you may be obliged to release
to whole or part of what you've done, but who is going to really know
or be able to tell except you?

.