> On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Richard Zidlicky wrote: > > > > Richard wrote: > > > I will NEVER agree to GPL. Under GPL, as soon as you use the > > > tiniest little bit of something "GPL'd", you HAVE to make your > > > code GPL, too. > > > > you have obviously not even looked at GPL but only read some anti-GPL > > fud instead, otherwise you would know how ridiculous that claim is. > > Hmmm? > > My understanding, as an open source fan, is that the GPL is infectious - > any software that includes GPL'd code is also GPL'd. You cannot use GPL'd > code in non-GPL releases. If you directly include GPL'd code into your program than the resulting program should be GPL - but this is kind of obvious. You can't simply cut&paste code from some project and convert it to your copyright.. you can't do that even with BSD license which is exorbitantly "liberal". You are actually quite lucky if you can reuse the code at all - of course the current SMSQ license is much more restricted in this sense and doesn't allow reuse of code outside of SMSQ for whatever purpose at all.
The relevant problems I see are this: - adding code to the project. By default if you add code to a GPL project it has to be GPL. Again, I see it as rather obvious that code added to some project should obey to its license so this is about as infectious as any license I can think of. As always the copyright holder can give permission to link with whichever code he likes. Note for example, that Linus Thorvalds has for the purpose of the Linux kernel defined linking so that code that uses the loadable module interface is explicitly free of any restriction and as you know there are plenty of binary only modules for Linux.. the same might be desirable for SMSQ. - linking against project. SMSQ is not a library so I don't see any problems here. It could be made explictily clear that any code using documented SMSQ interfaces in any way is free of any restriction if that makes anyone sleep better. - reusing parts of code SMSQ code in other projects.. the case I have explained above. The "infectious" aspect of GPL is partly a historical misunderstanding and partly FSF policy. GPL version 1 was not so well formulated in this respect.. perhaps not quite unintentionally but that is offtopic. Where GPL *is* really infectious is with libraries. If a library is (c) GPL (not LGPL like libc!) than only GPL programs can link against the library.. that is why there is LGPL which places no restriction on the program which is linked against LGPL software. Since SMSQ is not a library this is very offtopic but it might help to clear up some confusion by mentioning the one prominent GPL library - readline. It was deliberately made GPL to make it a bit harder to write non-GPL programms.. such things do happen but aren't relevent in the case of an operating system. Last not least you mentioned gcc. Of course GPL does not say anything about what can or can't be compiled with gcc, nor does it infect license of code that someone happened to compile with gcc.. just as writing something in a GPL editor doesn't affect the copyright of the text. All it says is that all parts of gcc itself have to be GPL and if you reuse some part of gcc in other projects than this other project has to be GPL. Richard
