Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Joe Butler
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 06:40 pm

There are databases that can scan, presumably binaries, looking for
correlations with a library of GPL'd code.

My thinking was to, say, take AbiWord, packaging it up as a raw word
processing engine and remove any GUI stuff from it (any changes that are
required to make that happen would be open sourced and it would be the
intent to comply with the relevant licence).  The commercial side of this
venture would be to provide an alternative front end that was authored
without any GPL code - the front end would call the GPL database engine.
The customer would be paying for original documentation, a better front end,
and other 'value added' resources.  If they want to download the source to
the engine wrapper, they can.  If they want to download the source to
AbiWord, they can do that too.  If they want the source to the new front
end, they can't have it.



<gswork@mailcity.com> wrote in message
news:1124811121.989157.307990@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> 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?
>

.